In your National View piece from the Washington Post, “Why wait for scientists to be proven right?” (Monitor Opinion, April 4) presidential candidates Donald Trump and John Kasich suggest that terrorism is a more immediate threat than climate change, and thus climate change deserves little attention.
This raises an interesting question: How does one properly evaluate a threat? Is it the number of lives at risk? Whose lives? How certain? When must action be taken?
Certainly we’d like our president to be capable of answering these questions, and more.
What is concerning is that most candidates (except perhaps Bernie Sanders) don’t seem to get the fact that climate change has a huge amount of forward momentum, and the potential to harm billions of people, while the changes required to slow it have a huge amount of inertia.
The troubling bottom line is that although we need to take climate change seriously now, we keep putting it off until later. And if we cross dangerous tipping points, later will be much too late. What to do?
Support candidates and organizations who understand the threat from climate change, and who are willing to show the needed leadership. Contact your elected officials at all levels and ask them to be leaders.
Roger Shamel
Hillsboro