Re: “Science loses ground to superstition,” (B.C. Views, The Leader, Oct. 2).
Tom Fletcher is, in my view, one of B.C.’s most under-appreciated commentators. This column sums up one of our world’s strangest phenomena – 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 recent Union of B.C. Municipalities 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 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
Media promote many myths
Tom Fletcher’s column hit on a subject that has bothered me for some time. Maybe it is the media’s preoccupation with eyeballs, but it seems to me that we are getting a lot of media output that gives faux reality the same weighting as scientifically tested data.
We, the public, are still untrained in appreciating the truth “free-for-all” that the digital world has dumped on us and our educational system is not yet set up to notch up students’ BS meters. Thus, we get public support for almost any conspiracy theory or economic myth, whether scientific or social.
Here on Vancouver Island, this means we see the repeated return of the “zombie” E&N passenger rail solution to the Colwood Crawl traffic congestion; the global warming Chicken Little performance; the never-ending suggestion that more health care spending will solve our health care issues; that everyone needs a university degree regardless of what it is; that science is usually wrong in the long run; that money obtained from another level of government is free; that we are entitled to anything/everything we can think of; that “they” are the cause of all my problems; that we do not need to create wealth – the rest of the world will always send us whatever we need; that we do not really need oil to maintain our current lifestyle; etc.
Fletcher has a deserved reputation for telling it how it is.
Keep it up.
Jim Knock, Esquimalt
Biblical destruction of planet
Re: “Science loses ground to superstition,” (B.C. Views, The Leader, Oct. 2).
It’s truly bewildering to see such a headline above yet even more of Tom Fletcher’s demagoguery towards David Suzuki – one who’s an ardent believer and follower of actual science.
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 Prime Minister Stephen Harper?
As one who’s spent some early years consuming 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 eco-system. For, according to the Book of Revelations, Earth is to eventually be laid complete waste for a considerable period of time – if not permanently (depending on Biblical interpretation).
So, really, why 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
