OPINION:
If you needed some good news for the new year, Everett Piper provides it by informing us that liberal elites are forgoing having children (“The elites’ extinction agenda: Getting rid of the children,” web, Jan. 7).
This is good news, as it is generally recognized that the overall health of a society is inversely proportional to the resident population of progressives.
Theirs is a self-induced neurosis about so-called climate change supposedly caused by carbon dioxide. Apparently they never studied enough to know that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide today are about the same as they were at the start of the Pliocene Epoch, over 5 million years ago. Between then and now there were several long ice ages, as carbon dioxide levels rose and fell.
Science — real science, not the junk kind favored by the political left — measuring radioactive isotopes in coal and limestone (i.e., calcium carbonate) indicates that almost 600 million years ago, atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide were some 15 times higher than they are today. Yet life flourished then despite (or perhaps, because of) it.
But don’t tell any of this to today’s fearful elites, or they might abandon their auto-destruct lifestyle and start having children. And that wouldn’t necessarily be a good thing for society.
ROGER JOHNSON
Kensington, Maryland
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