Dear Editor:
RE: Comments appreciated, Aug. 25.
I wholeheartedly agree with Jan Corbett that it’s the Advertiser editor’s right – even responsibility – to comment at the end of letters, and especially those that contain improbable “facts”.
Adding, as he did, to a recent letter that 97 per cent of climate scientists agree that human activity – primarily burning fossil fuels – is causing climate change is helpful to readers.
But to add my own two cents, even that 2013 survey number is now outdated. In 2021, Cornell University found the scientific consensus on climate has reached 99.9%. And, as the UK Guardian stated when reporting this study last October, “The tiny minority of sceptical voices has diminished to almost nothing as evidence mounts of the link between fossil-fuel burning and climate disruption.”
Here’s something else nearly 100% guaranteed: Advertiser readers who think climate change is a hoax will find yet another source – almost always backed by fossil fuel money when you dig around – to reject peer reviewed science.
But even if people scoff at science they don’t agree with, how to explain what is happening in the real world of extreme weather events? Those massive floods, deadly heat domes, punishing droughts and brutal wildfires that are all breaking historic records in so many places, including western Canada.
Our part of southwestern Ontario has thankfully dodged a lot of the climate catastrophes experienced elsewhere this summer. Yet who even knew what a derecho was until that monster storm ferociously slammed this province and parts of Quebec on May 21, causing more than $875 million in damages and 11 deaths.
The odds are awfully high we’re in for many more climate-related disasters in the years and decades to come.
So yes please, dear editor, keep adding those comments!
Liz Armstrong,
Erin