Your Opinion: Response to Will's "bizarre logic'

Dear Editor:

George Will's commentary, "Climate change's instructive past," references two books that show how devastating modest, naturally caused, regional climate change has been to human civilization. Take his bizarre logic out of the column, and it easily makes the point that we should indeed be concerned about global warming.

He writes about how past climate change led to extreme rain events that washed away topsoil and resulted in food shortages and cannibalism. He then goes into gruesome detail you don't want to read with your morning coffee.

Will's take away: "Human behavior did not cause this climate change. Instead, climate warming caused behavioral change."

He calls out to "climate Cassandras" to read these books. This would include the 97 percent of climate scientists who warn us that pumping CO2 into our atmosphere at ever increasing rates will warm our globe faster than natural causes did in the past. Does he believe that any climate scientist would be unaware of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age? Of course not.

His purpose is to scare the uninformed that solving climate change will rob us of our wealth and liberty, which scares him more than the thought of a family member eating him for lunch. I guess he's convinced he'll be on the rich end of the fork.

Will's logic: because humanity's response to past naturally caused, regional climate change resulted in barbaric human behavior, we should have an equally catastrophic response to today's man-made global warming.

We know a lot more about climate change now than they did in the 14th century. Human activities are changing our climate this time around, and we have considerable control over how bad it will get. We have good studies and experience that show market-based solutions can reduce emissions without taking our wealth or liberty.

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