Trust God, but tie your camel
In a letter (“God offers hope”) from March 16, the writer claims that fears “concerning COVID-19 and climate change propaganda” are causing “a loss of hope by many people.” The rest is a mini-sermon based on the writer’s religious beliefs.
Science is fallible, but most published studies are credible. In the case of a pandemic, where time is of the essence, mistakes can be made, evidence misunderstood. Mistakes have been made trying to understand COVID-19 and its attendant vaccines. Much remains that we don’t understand. But long term, science is self-correcting.
What about climate change “propaganda”? Since 1856, when Eunice Foote first demonstrated that excess carbon dioxide can warm air, evidence supporting global warming has mounted. Unnumbered peer-reviewed scientific articles have accumulated evidence. In 1988, 132 years after Foote’s discovery, the United Nations established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to address greenhouse gas effects. Climate data have been accumulating for a long time.
For 35 years, international teams of scientists throughout the world have collaborated across continents to better understand the “greenhouse gas” interactions driving increasing temperatures, with their secondary effects. Those peer-reviewed findings have converged: Increased temperatures disrupt historical weather patterns, bringing droughts, floods and ultimately starvation. Entire populations — men, women, children — try to escape lands no longer able to support them. Ask folks from the Horn of Africa. Or even parts of California.
On Monday, the IPCC published its latest report. International media headlined this “propaganda” thusly: “Warnings about humanity’s future don’t get more dire than this”; “World’s top climate scientists issue ‘survival guide for humanity’”; “Scientists release ‘survival guide’ to avert climate disaster”; “World is on brink of catastrophic warming”; “Risky feedback loops are accelerating climate change”; “A last chance to save the planet”; and “World can still avoid worst of climate collapse with genuine change.”
Anyone for tying their camels?
Pete Haug
Colfax
Better sources of power
Nice to see President Biden supporting salmon, treaty rights and dam breaching. As you may or may not know, the four Lower Snake River dams were made to be breached as they are half earthen and half concrete. Maybe those who put them in had the forethought to think that we wouldn’t be here with an archaic form of hydro power generation and be more advanced than we are with alternative forms of energy 50 years from when they were put in. We can’t live in the past and have to move ahead and progress to new and better ways of power generation.
Julian Matthews
Lapwai
