Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D.

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.

Crazy from the Heat (1985). Thirty years gone.

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To the Editor:

Re “Liberalism’s Gun Problem” (column, Dec. 6):

Despite Ross Douthat’s characterization of himself as “modestly persuadable” in the gun control debate, he is actually playing right into the hands of the Republican Congress, the National Rifle Association and the gun manufacturers, all of whom are motivated not by the potential problems cited by Mr. Douthat but merely by greed.

Mr. Douthat’s concerns about police tactics, black-market guns and other alleged problems if we had gun control are all red herrings.

States require a license to drive a car; we don’t debate this requirement based on the concept that some people will violate the law or that the police might use unprofessional tactics to enforce it. Without laws, we would be uncivilized.

As shown in other Western countries, laws banning handguns clearly reduce gun violence even if they do not eradicate it. All who carry guns other than hunting rifles are planning on using them to kill others (even allegedly in self-defense). A civilized society should ban them. It’s pretty simple.

ELLYN ROTH

New York

Note from KBJ: Yes, it's simple—to a simpleton. Ellyn Roth has obviously never heard of the Second Amendment. Banning guns won't get rid of guns. All it will do, as anyone with any common sense knows, is ensure that only criminals have guns. Why is this so hard to understand?

A smart aleck gets schooled by Dinesh d'Souza.

Jonathan Turley nails it. I fully expect the next Republican president to use the same powers that Barack Obama wielded, but to the opposite effect. What goes around comes around. The Left will rue the day that it supported Obama's lawlessness.

The Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island. Click to enlarge.

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