Withdrawal on Paris

I have a number of disagreements with your editorial regarding our withdrawal from the Paris Accord. Despite aspects you cite as “unfair,” it is an agreement entered into in good faith by our nation. Our withdrawal puts us in the good company of two Third World countries. It may be “America First,” but we are all a part of spaceship Earth, which shares only one atmosphere. No wall will help. Fortunately most of our major companies are committed to the goals of the agreement.

It is understandable that the Republican Party seems to have become anti-intellectual and anti-science. They were scared into this stance by the politically active fundamentalist Christian bloc. There are a lot more votes in their bloc than there are of us who believe the Enlightenment actually happened.

Fox News and Rush Limbaugh love to talk about junk science and the prediction of global cooling in the 1970s. Below is a quote from a more reliable source: Wikipedia.

“Global cooling was a conjecture during the 1970s of imminent cooling of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere culminating in a period of extensive glaciation. This hypothesis had little support in the scientific community, but gained temporary popular attention due to a combination of a slight downward trend of temperatures from the 1940s to the early 1970s and press reports that did not accurately reflect the full scope of the scientific climate literature, which showed a larger and faster-growing body of literature projecting future warming due to greenhouse gas emissions. The current scientific opinion on climate change is that the Earth has not durably cooled, but underwent global warming throughout the 20th century.”

There is a lack of public understanding of the differences in climate and weather, conjecture and theory, theory without experimental support, and theory with multiple confirmatory experimental results.

WADE SELPH

Hot Springs Village