Letter: The Nassau Institute is dead wrong - again!

EDITOR, The Tribune.

Not that they had much of it, but whatever little credibility the Nassau Institute (NI) did have left certainly evaporated when they jumped on the cuckoo bandwagon of climate change deniers.

These local counterparts of Glen Beck and Sarah Palin with glee seized on the story of the stolen emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit to support their delusional idea that climate change is a global conspiracy by the vast majority of the world's scientists, environmentalists and political leaders.

According to the NI in a letter to your newspaper on Thursday, December 10, what has been described as the "greatest scam in history" is being turned on its head.

But, as British Climate Change Secretary Ed Milliband says, "This is scientific consensus from around the world. It's as universal a view as you can get. One chain of emails does not undo scientific consensus." Mr. Milliband used words like "dangerous ... irresponsible ... saboteurs" to describe the climate change deniers in his own country.

The evidence is overwhelming and incontrovertible that the earth is warming and that human activity is the main cause of it.

Yet the NI people are in denial like the flat earthers of old and some extraordinarily ignorant people of today who still believe the sun revolves around the earth, man has yet to set foot on the moon and cigarettes are not dangerous to your health.

The NI and similar so-called think tanks slavishly peddle day after day the line of the corporate interests who want nothing to get in the way of their unconscionable profiteering.

It is those same corporate interests whose callous greed is doing the most damage to the environment of this planet, just as their fraudulent market forces con game has brought the global economy to the edge of collapse.

Most intelligent people do not have to be accomplished scientists to understand that you can't go on pumping millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and the oceans every day without devastating consequences for life on this planet.

NI's snide suggestion that Prime Minister Ingraham should not attend the Copenhagen conference but should stay home and sort out public finances is typical of their arrogant attitude.

Fortunately for our country, Mr. Ingraham's thinking is not narrowly confined to the ideological box in which the NI people are pathetic prisoners.

He is capable of managing our government and applying his mind and his energies to different things in the course of a day and he is masterfully managing the economic crisis thrust on the Bahamas by external forces.

Mr. Ingraham would have been grossly irresponsible had he not decided to go to Copenhagen to add the voice of the Bahamas to that of other vulnerable states that are at grave risk from rising sea levels, of which the Bahamas is the fifth most vulnerable.

He and the other national leaders meeting in Copenhagen do not have the luxury of talking fool like the NI and waiting until all our coral and marine resources are destroyed by acidification, and 80 per cent of the Bahamas is under water.

Mr. Ingraham and his delegation need to be there to help press the case of developing countries like the Bahamas to slow down the degradation of the planet and to seek funds to mitigate the effects of climate change which can wreak havoc on our environment, our economy and our public finances -- not to mention our viability as a state.

He goes to Copenhagen with the prayers and best wishes of intelligent, level-headed and patriotic Bahamians with him.

GALILEO

Nassau,

December 12, 2009

Published On:Monday, December 14, 2009