'Our house is on fire.' Climate warnings have been ignored for too long

 

LETTER TO THE EDITOR 

CAPE COD TIMES

AUGUST 14, 2021 

'Our house is on fire.' Climate warnings have been ignored for too long

I found the front page Times story “Atlantic current chaos in the cards?” stunning. Not the news found within, but the fact that it is not new. 

In 2006, Al Gore’s documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” explained the eventuality of this very same series of events if we did not heed the science around global warming. I distinctly remember the chart of Greenland, the arrows showing ocean currents, the glacial freshwater meeting salinity, and the stoppage of flow.

Long before “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore, Bill McKibben, and many others had spent decades trying to raise the alarm about the issue of global warming. Because of the truth they spoke, they were mostly dismissed as anti-establishment space cadets. 

The establishment, it now appears, had a vested interest in silencing them. It has become public knowledge that Exxon-Mobil and other petrochemical companies knew in the 1980s about the damage they were causing. They buried the reports. They hid or discredited the science.

In 1989, when Bill McKibben released his book “The End Of Nature,” he was again dismissed as a radical killjoy and extremist. However, the rest of the world took notice. Today that book is considered one of the most important and influential books on global warming, printed in dozens of languages. 

All that time lost and here we are, living the chaos. Our house is on fire. Me, I’m just sitting here, stunned, angry, and heartsick, watching it burn. Al and Bill tried. Who’s going to save us now?

Kristin Knowles, Orleans