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Letters: Portland protests; climate science

Daily Times-Call - 7/23/2020

Jul. 23--Trump's vision of America is seen in Portland

Trump is sending federal officers who have no training for protest control to Portland, Ore., to harass and arrest peaceful demonstrators. This is a civil rights atrocity. Officers looking like combat troops travel in unmarked vehicles and show no identification. Peaceful protesters are treated violently, arrested, and whisked away in unmarked vans.

A cell phone video shows one demonstrator standing quietly and holding a loud speaker over his head. He was shot without cause by a federal agent using "less-lethal" ammunition. He suffered a fractured face and skull. Homeland Security sent these agents to Oregon at Trump's request.

Saturday night, a retired Navy veteran and Naval Academy graduate, Christopher David, 53, attended the protest. He had never attended a protest before and intended to ask the federal officers why they are not honoring their oath to uphold the Constitution.

The Navy vet saw a line of pregnant mothers holding arms and then watched federal agents gas them and knock them over. With his arms held high, he stepped in front of these federal agents and asked them his question. Trump's federal agents attacked him with batons and chemical spray, breaking bones in his hand.

What have we come to? The entire world is watching madman Trump command federal agents to commit violence against peaceful protesters, pregnant moms, and a Navy veteran.

This is Trump's "Make America Great Again." On TV, Trump says his agents in Portland did a great job, and he will send more if need be. This is his view of America. He wants the USA to be just like Germany in the 1930s. He plans the same terror for other USA cities.

This must stop! The Senate saved him from impeachment. The Senate and House must stop him now.

Vote Trump out Nov. 3.

Diane Wood

Longmont

Cherry-picked naysayers don't dismiss climate data

(Re: The False Alarm of Climate Change)

Climate change is a well-established fact, as is its cause: CO2 levels, which are now the highest in 3 million years.

Every prestigious science academy in the world agrees (NASA has a list of 200; Google this).

Carl Brady can of course cherry pick his contrarians: Lomborg, Shellenberger, Michael Moore. Neither is qualified to dismiss the mountains of evidence.

Carl Brady can call it a "meme" if he wants and slyly suggest the narrative that a concern for our future is the product of social propaganda. This creative framing ducks the fact that climate predictions from scientists are right on the money; whereas contrarians' predictions are way off.

The IPCC tells us that staying at 1.5 degrees Celsius vs. 2.0 deg Celsius would save hundreds of millions of people from dire effects of sea level rise, drought, fires, stronger storms, heat waves, extinctions, floods, acidification of oceans, and so on. Without intervention we will surpass 4 degrees Celsius (En-Roads study by MIT).

We had three 500-year floods around Houston that beat odds of 46 million to one. We had heat waves and record fires in Siberia's unmanaged forests. We had climate extremes in 2017 that caused U.S. taxpayers over $300 billion in damages.

Naysayers, like the godless in the tobacco industry who trafficked in doubting the science, have led us to the brink of a climate abyss.

In the Old Testament we are commanded, "Do not put a stumbling block before the blind." Deception is thereby a sin. Especially when a livable planet is at stake.

Of course, even naysayers wish to live in a pleasant, congenial world. But, if we don't elect leaders who take the problem seriously, the meme of "nothing to see here" will turn the doubters' victory into ashes.

Jan Freed

Los Angeles

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