Here is a letter-to-the editor I wrote earlier this year to a magazine to which I subscribe. My letter was in response to a letter from another reader denying that climate change is being caused by human activity.
Editor:
I disagree profoundly with the letter from Jerry S. in the last issue in which he denies that the crisis of rapid climate change is being caused by human activity.
With his denial, he disagrees with the 97 percent of climate scientists who believe that climate change is human caused. He disagrees with leaders of the 191 world states and the European Union who signed the Paris Climate Accord designed to reduce human contributions to climate change. He disagrees with the Union of Concerned Scientists, with the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, with the National Academy of Sciences, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, with the leaders of major corporations like Hewlett Packard and Microsoft, with Pope Francis. At least he’s got a few talk radio mavens and some Fox News talking heads on his side.
He brings out all of the same illogical arguments of those who do not think that humans are causing climate change and he ends by giving us a clue to his politics when he goes on about money going into the pockets of the government.
He even throws in a couple of sentences about refrigerant gases (which by the way, he gets wrong. CFC gases, chlorofluorocarbons, were banned because of their destructive effects on the ozone layer and were replaced by HFCs, hydrofluorocarbons, which are much more benign. Those regulations have worked quite well).
I wonder if he also denies that tobacco use is a major cause of cancer. I wonder if he denies that exposure to asbestos causes lung diseases, including cancer. I wonder if he denies that lead in paint and drinking water are poisonous. I wonder if he denies that excessive exposure to sun is related to melanoma.
Although it is easy to pick apart Jerry’s arguments, the issue is much more serious than whom to believe about the cause of climate change. If the overwhelming evidence is correct, the earth’s people and their societies face an immediate threat to their very existence, to OUR very existence. Human caused climate change is not a political football to be debated on Twitter, Facebook, and news programs, or denied by demagogues or partisan political hacks seeking power. Climate change is the greatest crisis that our species has ever encountered. And addressing it is a moral imperative, a call to action, not just by governments and other organizations but by each one of us. To turn away in denial in the face of such evidence is immoral. During WWII, governments turned away in denial from the Holocaust, and the result was the deaths of millions. To turn away in denial about human-caused global warming will result in the deaths of billions.
We each must take action and bear witness—by writing to our elected officials, by speaking to our neighbors, by voting for candidates who understand the urgency of the problem, by sending letters to the editor of newspapers and magazines. We have a moral responsibility to our children, to our civilizations, to our natural world. To turn away from that responsibility is to commit a sin that will resonate through the ages to come.