I totally agree with what Nancy Willard wrote (Oct. 10) on the subject of climate change in her letter: “The evidence that climate change is real is insurmountable; it is happening now and will get worse.” Presumably, her focus is on human-generated change, as distinguished from change caused by natural processes.
According to nasa.gov, a whopping “ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities, and most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position.”
Deniers of this reality fancy that these scientists are pushers of a utopian fantasy, born of liberal ideology, who refuse to acknowledge that it is God who controls climate. So when the thing goes postal and mows down thousands at a clip, why, that’s the almighty’s wrath at work. (Think righteous payback for a host of social evils.)
Right. And it was God who visited the bubonic plague on 50 million Europeans in the 14th century as a punishment for sin, not a bacterium discovered by a French scientist centuries later. (No, I don’t believe the bacterium was the instrument of divine vengeance, as some might retort.)
In medieval times, people thought the solution to the plague lay in penitential practices, but science would eventually prove that it lay in prevention through public health measures, largely.
Divinely-controlled climate? Not buying it. I prefer to align myself with the clear-sighted bad boys of science.
William LaRochelle, Lewiston
Send questions/comments to the editors.
Comments are no longer available on this story