I emigrated to the U.S. in 1978, when airlines published monthly magazines. On the flight, I read an article describing how burning fossil fuels was contributing to potentially disastrous global warming. Climate change science was in its infancy and debatable. In my homeland of England, a popular science journalist with the same name – Nigel Calder – wrote an influential book predicting global cooling. He helped produce a film titled “The Great Global Warming Swindle.”

Within a few years, the science was sufficiently detailed to be considered “settled.” The practical consequences are undeniable, from Maine’s January storms to high-temperature records being repeatedly broken throughout the U.S. and now Helene’s immense tidal surge and deluge of rain, leaving in its wake a broad swath of death and destruction.

There are no longer any credible climate change deniers in the scientific community, but the Republican Party stubbornly refuses to acknowledge reality. Trump ridicules global warming as a “hoax.”

Regardless of our politics, we need Republicans to accept that climate change is real and to engage in a sustained bipartisan effort to meet the difficult challenge of halting additional global warming. The only way I can see this happening is if Republicans are soundly defeated in November, from the local level to the national. We need to force a reckoning upon them that is harsh enough to provoke an abandonment of this reckless disregard of science and reality.

Time is running out in which to do this.

Nigel Calder
Newcastle