Editor:
Re: Science loses ground to superstition, Oct. 1 column.
Tom Fletcher is, in my view, one of BC’s most under-appreciated commentators.
Last week’s BC Views column sums up one of our world’s strangest phenomenon – superstition increases in lockstep with the increase in human knowledge.
Fletcher focuses on our endless climate-change conflict, but you can add debates such as ‘smart meters causing cancer,’ ‘vaccines causing autism,’ ‘genetic engineering bad/organic good’ and on and on. Toss in the anti-coal and anti-pipeline crowd, and you have a mass of ignorance that boggles the mind.
Never have so many known so little about basic mathematics, physics, chemistry, history and so forth.
To illustrate my point, consider that the Earth’s atmosphere is 77 per cent nitrogen and 21 per cent oxygen. That leaves two per cent for all the trace gases including carbon dioxide – currently .04 of one per cent. How can a reasonable person argue that carbon dioxide is the primary driver of climate change?
Fletcher also notes the genetic engineering (GE) debate at the UBCM’s recent convention. GE offers some of the best solutions to hunger afflicting much of the Earth’s human population. In spite of the potential benefits, nearly half of our municipal leaders buy into the anti-GE hysteria.
If you listened to the Vancouver city council, we should all be living in yurts and scratching – along with our chickens – a living from backyard organic gardens.
Mind boggling!
Francis Patrick Jordan, White Rock
• • •
It’s truly bewildering to see such a headline above yet even more of columnist Tom Fletcher’s demagoguery towards David Suzuki – one who’s an ardent believer and follower of actual science rather than the political science from which Fletcher apparently speaks.
Also, if it’s actual science that Fletcher truly seeks, why does he conveniently overlook the blatant anti-science thinking and frightening policy of his bird-of-a-feather econo-euphoria fanatic, Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
As one who’s spent some early years extensively, avidly consuming much fundamentalist Christian preaching and teaching – including the evangelical sort towards which Harper and many of his MPs claim to be devout – it’s clear that such theology does not at all concern itself with a healthy, pristine Earth ecosystem, the latter which is generally well-aligned with scientific caution.
For, according to the Book of Revelations, Earth is to eventually – perhaps, in many believers’ minds, sooner than later – be laid complete waste for a considerable period of time, if not permanently, depending on Biblical interpretation.
So, really, why the hell worry about an unhealthy state of the planet’s environment – especially when there are so many jobs to be had?
Frank G. Sterle, Jr., White Rock