As Mark Twain famously proclaimed: “you can fool some of the people part of the time but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. “
Mr. Collins’ two scientific experts aren’t in the field of climate change. Willie Soon is an astrophysicist and David Legates is a geography professor and meteorologist. Both are global warming skeptics so every talk they give suggests that some form of evidence for global warming isn’t really all that bad.
The important fact is that 98 percent of scientists (not fossil fuel lackeys the Bush administration trotted out in the past) agree that excesses of carbon are impacting the climate. And sea-level rise isn’t the only threat that we must deal with. Climate change is evident in the severe weather abnormalities occurring in the past few years. And this is the key point that we must acknowledge. The various impacts are getting worse.
We are now experiencing accelerated climate change in ever more consistent patterns: devastating hurricanes, severe droughts that are threatening the survival of the cattle and agriculture industries in the US and leading to starvation in other parts of the world; forest fires that ravage the west and south west six months earlier seasonally than in the recent past; also carbon absorbed by the ocean is leading to ocean acidification. The drastic changes in weather cost the individual victims, their communities, and the country billions of dollars.
Mr. Collins would have us put our heads in the sand and scream that there is a government conspiracy. Why he wouldn’t want programs that would begin remediation and thereby save the future of development in Sussex County is hard to understand.
If you had a sick child and were watching his fever rise every day, at what point would you begin to seek help. Would Mr. Collins wait until the child’s temperature has reached 106 and he was having convolutions? Most people would think that it is more prudent to begin the modifications that will slow the process rather than wait for horrific changes that are far more expensive to fix later, or are even beyond our power to remediate.
Kit Zak
Lewes
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