Top scientists agree about climate change
I refer to the letter by G. Bailey (“No need for hysterics on climate change”, November 13).
Your correspondent does not offer a scintilla of evidence, scientific or anecdotal, to back up his assertion that climate scientists don’t know what they’re talking about.
A position without hard evidence is a belief, and a belief is a product of the imagination, not critical thinking, and I see none of that in the letter, just hyperbole and an allusion to a conspiracy by world science. Some conspiracy: thousands of the world’s leading scientists from 120 countries over 50 years have pretty well all reached the same conclusion, that climate change and global warming are here and will be exponentially dramatic.
In the competitive world of science, it is rare to get two scientists to agree on anything. To have a few thousand from multiple disciplines agree after comprehensive and rigorous peer-reviewed studies that climate change is largely man-made is extraordinary, to say the least.
In that context, irrational comments with no foundation in the facts have no place in any serious discussion on the single most important issue of our times. But blind theory will always exist, as it does on this vital subject in the US Congress, a body not known to be idiotproof.
As Mark Twain supposedly said, “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.” I am reminded that it took a few hundred years for the flat earth society to disappear. We don’t have that long.
