For the sake of discussion let’s say there was a very rich man who had been feeling poorly for some time and he couldn’t understand what could be the matter, so he went to doctor after doctor to find out what the problem might be. Not being happy with the diagnosis, he continued until he had consulted with 100 doctors.

Out of those 100 doctors, 97 of them came up with the same diagnosis, which was, if he didn’t make some serious changes in his lifestyle he was going to become very seriously ill and could quite possibly die. Three of those doctors said that his problem was not caused by his lifestyle and it was just the natural course of living and he needn’t do anything.

Now let’s extrapolate that situation to our planet. Ninety-seven percent of the climate scientists in the world are of the opinion that global warming is a serious problem, it is caused by human behavior and that drastic measures need to be taken to save our planet from dire consequences. One example of the huge problems that may be caused by our inaction is the permafrost in the Arctic Circle. If this starts to melt it will release an unstoppable supply of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that may lead to our planet being uninhabitable for human beings.

Unfortunately for us, there is a large segment of the population who choose to believe the three percent of those climate scientists that say that we are not causing global warming, so there is no need to change our lifestyles. We have come to a point, in our country at least, where there is a lot of “My ignorance is as good as your knowledge” moments, not only with science but with politics too.

For instance, the fact that seventy-four million people voted for a man who was a failure at nearly every business he started, filing bankruptcy several times, stiffing his investors, his suppliers and his contractors, was made by the courts to pay students of his sham university $25 million dollars and fined $5 million for using money from his own charity for private purposes and on top of everything else attempted to overthrow our duly elected government. And yet today he still has a very large following of voters.

Unfortunately, these are the times we are living in and this is my small attempt to interject some reason into the conversation.

Larry Benson

Enumclaw