Last week's letter to the editor by Robert Crocker really struck a nerve with me. He claimed that Vivek Ramaswamy was the only one of the eight Republican presidential candidates that knows that climate change is a hoax, implying in his letter that in fact climate change is a hoax in his opinion. He forgets for a moment that the seven other candidates acknowledged that climate change is an issue to deal with, which, if you have been watching the last 30 years, would be the first time a Republican candidate for president has ever done so. Climate change denial has been a plank of all recent Republican administrations. I commend the seven for being enlightened enough to change the discourse. At the same time, I feel Vivek automatically disqualified himself from consideration on the ticket.
Mr. Crocker states perhaps now there can be more public discussion about solving environmental issues with real science. I am curious what he considers real science. Is he aware of the thousands of scientific papers that have been published on the subject over the last 35 years? Does he have a degree in climate science or subscribe to any of the many climatology journals. Has he read the regularly published reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the UN, or journals like Nature and Science?
Is he aware that farmers, ranchers, foresters, natural resource managers and others have been aware of climate change for decades and have been working to deal with the consequences? Climate change is real and represents the greatest threat to our future on earth, barring a meteor strike, that our generation and the next 10 generations will ever know. It is not a theory.
Ignoring it because a politician says it is not real is simply willful ignorance.
Real science is found through scholastic pursuits, not by watching cable entertainment or social media clips.
As an aside, I found it humorous that Mr. Crocker made the case that our leaders lie to our citizens and the citizens know it but ignore it. How ironic, given that our former president was shown to have lied in public statements over 11,000 times in his four years in office and continues to take money from his followers by promoting his “stolen election” lies. In this, I guess he is fully aware of the subterfuge.
Nick Wheeler
Centralia
