Year 2, Month 2, Day 19: Bonnie Prince Charlie

The UK Sun runs a brief piece on Prince Charles, who’s come out swinging at the climate deniers:

PRINCE Charles blasted climate change sceptics yesterday, accusing them of playing “a reckless game of roulette” with the planet.

The campaigning royal added that doubters are having a “corrosive effect” on public opinion.

He asked: “How are these people going to face their grandchildren?”

Charles hit out at claims people fighting climate change “are secretly conspiring to undermine and deliberately destroy the entire market-based capitalist system”.

This letter was sent on February 10. I used the British spelling of “sceptic.” I may be delusional, but I always feel a greater freedom to use big words and fancy allusions when I’m writing to the British press. Even the Sun, which ain’t no Times of London.

Prince Charles’ comments on those who deny the threat of climate change are entirely apropos.   The petroleum-funded media and the politicians they enable (both in the UK and the USA) are playing a very dangerous game:  whether fomenting paranoid delusions that the world’s climatologists have formed a giant cabal secretly planning a New World Order,  attributing the dramatic uptick in extreme weather events across the globe to “sunspot activity,” or simply refusing to acknowledge the existence of a problem, these individuals and organizations are setting the future of their own descendants, and the rest of us, at risk.   One has only to examine their rhetoric to recognize that the term “sceptic” is a terrible misnomer; far from being empiricists committed to the use of reason, logic and evidence, they are so determined to make the world fit their increasingly twisted conspiracy theories that they’ve left Occam’s razor far, far behind.

Warren Senders