Climate change danger is real

By Letter to the Editor on February 28, 2019.

Re: “Follow the global warming science,” Feb. 8

Why does the Medicine Hat News continue to pander to the fringe? There are no “highly credentialed scientists on both sides” as Lynn Thacker states, none.

The science is clear, unambiguous and accepted by everyone who is not a crackpot or a fringe thinker. At this point there is not one scientific organization on this planet that denies the conclusions of the IPCC. The last holdouts were American Petroleum Geologists, who now acknowledge the danger that the insurance industry continues to pay for. Look at escalating claims for climate related disasters – that is fact, not some fiction dreamt up by someone mired in propaganda.

The danger is real, present and requires a response, for which the oil industry is not prepared. The oil industry itself is irresponsible. We had to get the Supreme Court involved to make bankrupt players clean up their abandoned wells – irresponsible and short sighted. The money spent on disinformation campaigns could have created a starting point. What we have instead is letter writers who crow out the talking points paid for and created by the disinformation campaigns funded by the oil industry.

This is my opinion – there are no good Nazis, there are no good effects from residential schools, there is no defensible use of blackface.This is a fact – there are most certainly not “highly credentialed scientists on both sides,” that is a misstatement of fact. There are a lot of people mired in the propaganda created by an irresponsible oil industry that thinks only of profits and never of long-term costs.

We really need to focus on the tidal wave headed our way and what we might do to reduce the damage. People like Thacker need to read up on the actual science instead of repeating their Facebook feed as fact.

Brian Latimer

Medicine Hat

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