Denial reveals small minds

Your report that eight out of 12 candidates for City Council do not accept the human causes of climate change reveals both their profound ignorance (where do they imagine all that extra carbon dioxide in the air is coming from?) and their astonishing arrogance in believing that conclusions reached by the world’s best scientists are somehow not binding on their much smaller minds.

But the most troubling aspect is that our society has become so scientifically illiterate that they feel, perhaps correctly, that their stupidity will not affect their chances of election. It is the same malaise that allows people to freely admit they can’t do math even though they would die of embarrassment before admitting that they can’t read or write, and the media bear a heavy responsibility for it.

The only possible response of an educated person to someone who feels free to ignore the human contribution to climate change is laughter, sustained until the object of this derision shrivels in shame, but this solution does not seem to have occurred to your journalists. Do they perhaps suffer from the same malaise?

Graham Andrews

Spokane