To the Editor:
If a terrorist organization somehow figured out how to raise global temperatures, thereby flooding coastal cities, destroying crops, threatening drinking water supplies, and causing devastating heat waves and storms, we would do whatever it took, and spend every last dollar we had, to stop it.
But when the world’s leading scientists tell us that such changes have already started to occur and that we are causing them, and when they warn us that unless we drastically reduce our burning of fossil fuels, we face an unimaginable catastrophe, our response has always been that it is much too difficult, and much too expensive, to do so.
On Saturday in Paris nearly 200 countries demonstrated for the first time that they took the scientists’ warnings seriously. Will we now do whatever it takes, and spend whatever amount we must, to prevent the consequences of climate change from becoming catastrophic? Or will we simply be helpless witnesses as the growing terror unfolds, slowly and inexorably, before our eyes?
ERIC CHIVIAN
Boston
The writer, a physician, is the founder and former director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.
Note from KBJ: What does the letter writer's occupation (physician) have to do with the substance of his letter? The answer is "Nothing." When he wrote the letter, therefore, why did he identify himself as a physician? Was he hoping to encourage fallacious reasoning, to wit: "Eric Chivian is a physician; therefore, what he says in nonmedical realms is true"? And why would the letters editor of the New York Times include the information, even if it were supplied?
Note 2 from KBJ: The letter writer says that "the world's leading scientists tell us that such changes have already started to occur and that we are causing them." What percentage of these "scientists" are progressives? If the scientists being questioned are representative of people generally, as far as politics is concerned, then consensus is meaningful. If all or most of the scientists are progressives, it's meaningless.
