A message to climate change deniers.

To a lot of you, nothing that can be said will change your minds.  You, for whatever reason, refuse to believe the overwhelming evidence that our planet is undergoing a change that is unprecedented in its history of human habitation.

Oh, sure, there have been periods in history when the climate — usually in localized places — has undergone dramatic changes.  But those periods occurred at times when man was not capable of modifying his surroundings in ways available now.

There is irrefutable evidence a warming trend has been in place since the beginning of the industrial age, an age during which mankind began to exercise more and more influence on his surroundings.

But perhaps the most critical of climate change deniers reside in the halls of power, our governments and the industrial complexes which exert inordinate control over those governments.

Those in power in government will gleefully continue to deny climate change as long as the giant conglomerates pump money into their coffers to help insure their continued occupation of the halls of power.

And as long as those conglomerates pump money to government purveyors, they will also be allowed to pump poisons into our air and our water and pollute our land with pesticides and herbicides and to encourage the rollback of the environmentally sound controls which have been emplaced by those more attuned to the frailty of the planet under the hand of man.

There are those of you who are too stupid to understand or too venal to admit weather and climate are only loosely related.  It is natural for there to be peculiarities in yearly, even monthly, alterations in the weather, but it is dangerously erroneous to equate those anomalies with the ongoing alterations taking place in the total planetary climate.

This year alone, Europe, including England, has undergone the longest, hottest period on record.

There are strong indications the polar icecaps are receding even more quickly than previously predicted.  It’s possible this quickening will accelerate itself and it seems to be doing so now.

In the past half century 3 billion birds have disappeared from North America.

Australia experienced its hottest summer on record during 2019.

There is evidence of large-scale migrations of humans due to crop failures and drought; part of the influx of immigrants to the United States from Central America is attributed to these conditions.

Not only will climate shifts and modifications affect the world’s output of crops, coral reefs are also suffering in part because of warming waters. Ocean dwellers are moving to other areas because of ocean temperatures.

The beginning of 2019’s hurricane season saw one of the most powerful hurricanes on record, with more forming in the eastern Atlantic.

Sure, some of these occurrences may be the result of short-term idiosyncrasies, but the overwhelming scientific opinion is global climate change is taking place.

Here’s one question to those who have the power to do something about this:  is it better to perhaps spend huge sums of money now addressing climate change and find you have wasted the money and effort, or to do nothing and leave your children and grandchildren with a planet less habitable than the one you inherited?

Chuck Witt is a retired architect and a lifelong resident of Winchester. He can be reached at chuck740@bellsouth.net.