Dear Editor:
"We lucked out!" Kennedy's Secretary of War Robert McNamara says in the documentary "Fog of War." The lesson was "Rationality will not save us." The 1962 Cuban missile crises almost produced mutual nuclear annihilation.
I recently wrote (8/27/16) that we are in a war with our climate which we have poisoned. There is no known scientific solution to the problem except rapid and complete replacement of carbon energy. The problem moves at geologic speed but is accumulative and relentlessly moving towards rising global temperatures.
Should we be comforted that the last 150 years have only seen a rise in global temperatures of 1.6 degrees Celsius? NASA says this is an alarming rise in global temperature as much of that rise has been in the last four decades. Is this significant? Well, when global temperatures fell by 5 degrees Celsius in the last 10,000 years North America experienced a minor Ice Age. Previously, when average earth temperatures fell by 10 degrees Celsius most of the Northern hemisphere was covered in ice.
We face a bleak future. That is not what alarms me. What alarms me is the total lack of action that citizens, family and friends are prepared to assume. We are not engaged in this war.
If engaged, Cole County citizens would be discussing what we could do. We would vote out politicians who have no answers. We would demand that city and county government find ways to have a carbon-free environment. We would demand that Ameren stop undermining alternative energies and change their business model into making money from energy efficiency and alternative energies. We would make similar demands of Missouri electrical Co-ops.
After my last letter on this issue friends teased me about arguing with the skeptics. That ship left the dock. The Yale Project on Climate lists six American groups on this issue. Alarmed and concerned are the top two (55 percent of the public). The bottom groups are doubtful and skeptic (21 percent of the public). Would a Missouri Tiger give an inch to a Jayhawk? We all live inside religious, political and social groups that shape our thinking. This diversity is good but when the problem is bigger than all of us, how will we pull together? That is the real question that confronts us.
Rational arguments will not save us. Are we left just to hope we can luck out?