Climate alarmism
It appears that climate alarmism is starting to wane. Many people have come to realize that the so-called experts who have predicted a climate catastrophe as a result of burning fossil fuels have been wrong.
Starting in the 1980’s climate activists started promoting global warming as the new environmental apocalypse. In 1989 a senior UN environmental official predicted that many nations would be wiped off the face of the earth as a result of rising sea levels. Other climate experts predicted that the Arctic region would be ice-free by 2018. All of these doomsday predictions have proved false.
The Earth’s climate is not static. The Earth has warmed and cooled throughout its history. These cycles will continue to occur. The biggest crime committed regarding the climate is the never-ending doomsday scenarios constantly perpetrated by climate activists. How many more false doomsday climate predictions are they going to make before they realize that humans have little control over the climate? The Earth will continue to experience periods of warming and cooling, like it has for millions of years.
Lewis Whiffen
Sharon
Clean energy
Senior economist Stephen Moore’s column (Feb. 20) opposing national and international efforts to make a transition to clean energy includes several errors of fact.
He writes “Arguably, not a single life has been or will be saved by this shameful and colossal misallocation of human resources.” But reductions in coal burning and tailpipe emissions in the US have already saved many lives and prevented many hospitalizations – as research from the American Lung Association (https://www.lung.org/clean-air/climate-change) and Boston’s own Health Effects Institute, has repeatedly shown (https://www.healtheffects.org/publications/research-reports).
Due in part to fossil fuel burning, sea level and average temperatures are rising faster and faster. Current state and local investments in hardening Massachusetts communities against flood, storm and heat wave threats are certainly necessary.
In contrast to legions of the world’s best scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the National Academy of Sciences, and the World Health Organization, Moore offers the nihilistic view that nothing can be done, and thus nothing should be done.
Bill Beckett
Watertown
Housing safety
In reading about Governor Healey’s proposal for narrow buildings to allow for more affordable housing but requiring only one point of egress, why not just build fire escapes on the sides of buildings like it was done before? I have even seen spiral-stair fire escapes in Boston if aesthetics are the problem. It could save some room (and some lives.)
Stephen Bowman
Winchester
