To the Editor:
Re “The River Untamable” (Week in Review, May 8):
What will it take to convince people that the world’s climate is changing and that we are causing it to change?
Will it be this latest flooding of the Mississippi River, brought about by record April rainfall in the Ohio River Valley and very high levels in other states, killing at least 18 people, flooding millions of acres of farmland, and causing untold misery and economic hardship?
Will it be that 90 cities in the United States and 19 countries around the world posted record-high temperatures in 2010? Or last year’s historic heat waves, droughts and fires in Russia and flooding in Pakistan and Australia, which together killed an estimated 17,000 people?
The year 2010 was tied with 2005 as the warmest year for our planet on record, since global temperatures were first accurately measured in 1850. It was also the wettest.
There is no longer any serious debate among the world’s leading scientists, including our own, that our excessive burning of fossil fuels is warming the Earth and resulting in extreme, wildly fluctuating and increasingly unstable changes to the world’s climate: torrential rains and flooding and more severe storms in some areas, heat waves and droughts in others.
When will we wake up to the climate and public health catastrophe unfolding before our eyes and demand that our political leaders and representatives really do something to address it?
ERIC CHIVIAN
Boston, May 12, 2011
The writer, a doctor, is director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.
Note from KBJ: This man, like so many academics who claim to be veracious inquirers, is a True Believer. He cites evidence that supports his pet theory, but no evidence that undercuts it. How convenient! The American people have not fallen for his hoax.
Note 2 from KBJ: See the post just after this one.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 