By Rev. Robert Plaisted

Guest Columnist

“Why this obsession with the climate change?” That’s the opening sentence from a recent letter to the editor, which consisted mostly of 15 questions, all beginning with the word “why.” I don’t have space to answer all 15, so I’ve chosen two. Both deal with climate change.

Before answering the first, I’ll ask a question of my own. Since when is it considered an obsession to be concerned with self-preservation? Everybody values survival, but if we mess up the climate crisis, we won’t get a second chance. Based on its importance to our future, climate change is the highest mountain we’ve ever seen. The culture-war obsessions of the far right are so many tiny molehills, repaired by the grounds crew at a golf course.

When we die, everything we value, dies with us. Should our species disappear, everything humans have done since we appeared on Earth, disappears with us. There is significant risk that uncontrollable warming of Earth will render it uninhabitable for us humans, so why would anyone quibble with people who are committed to avoiding that dire outcome? Extinction is forever; we are not.

The second question was, “Why are we in a headlong rush to rid the economy of oil-powered vehicles in favor of lithium battery powered vehicles?” Lithium isn’t the problem; carbon is. Lithium-ion batteries are a slight transition away from burning carbon — our suicidal behavior — which is destroying the survivability of Earth’s climate system. We’ve invented other things that threaten the long-term future of our species — nuclear weapons, for instance — but nothing has lowered the horizons of human civilization like relentless fossil-fuel combustion.

If we stop burning carbon right now, we won’t see any positive effects for at least 50 to 60 years. If we don’t stop burning carbon, we’ll run out of time to make better choices within less than a decade. It’s long past time for us to smarten up. That’s scientific fact, not “computer estimates of something that could happen sometime in the future.”

The climate crisis is real, urgent, and indisputable. Consensus among climate scientists, which stood at 97% when I began writing on this subject, now stands at 99.9999%, as close to absolute certainty as science gets. People keep disputing it anyway, disregarding mountains of evidence. Wildfires, smoke-polluted air, droughts, floods (including my hometown of Jay), tornados, hurricanes, and record-smashing heatwaves have exploded across the globe in the last decade. That’s the price we’re paying for choosing the profitability of corporations above protecting the habitability of Earth.

Addicted tobacco smokers often deny they’re killing themselves, right up until they die. Denialists regularly turn mountains into molehills, and molehills into mountains. The dust and chaff they throw in the faces of gullible people are like the molehills I used to rake off the lawn when I was a kid — here today, gone tomorrow. Asking “why” is tokenism, unless you’re willing to listen to verified facts. Denying reality is the last refuge of desperate, terrified people.

The climate crisis, which denialists barely will acknowledge, is more like Mount Everest. Unless we can find a route that will bring us safely to that distant summit, and soon, we all risk perishing in our failure. Astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson wrote, “The good thing about science is that it’s true, whether or not you believe in it.” Remember, when enough people choose not to believe climate science, it’s not just their funeral; it’s everybody’s.

Rev. Robert Plaisted is a retired United Methodist clergyman, formerly of Bridgton, now residing in Bath.