Month 7, Day 28: Guess What’s Coming To Dinner?

There was a big storm in Washington, DC — so I combined yesterday’s letter to the Times with the one I sent to the Hartford Courant a few days back, and sent it off to the WaPo.

The recent storm that knocked out power systems and claimed lives in Washington over the weekend is a preview of coming attractions. As the temperature increases, more water enters the atmosphere, giving us more rain, more snow, more storm damage, power outages, and destroyed property. While no single storm is “caused” by global warming, the greenhouse effect makes these devastating storms more likely. And yet a significant portion of the American public thinks anthropogenic global warming is a “hoax.” Why? Because our news media have abdicated their journalistic responsibilities, hewing instead to a policy of false equivalence that “balances” a climatologist with an industry-funded “skeptic,” misleading the public that there really is a significant “debate” on this issue. There is no debate; if the scientific consensus on global warming was represented accurately, we’d hear from forty-eight scientists for every denier, and our nation’s citizens would be demanding meaningful action on climate change.

Warren Senders