In the Associated Press article “Scientists Say Wind, Drought Worsen Fires” (Nov. 13), science writer Seth Borenstein notes that both nature (strong winds) and human activities (climate disruption) are responsible for the historic wildfires currently destroying lives and property in California. But President Donald Trump, notorious for ignoring scientists, claims to know the culprit: “There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except for … gross mismanagement of the forests.”
Borenstein quotes senior fire scientists from Utah, Michigan and Germany as saying, in effect, that the president doesn’t know what he’s talking about. In southern California, the fire “burned through shrub land, not forest” according to the University of Utah’s Philip Dennison. And the northern fires are not burning in “fuel-chocked closed-canopy forests.” Earlier fires on some of those areas had already lost their fuel-rich understories to fires in 2005 and 2008.
The dean of the University of Michigan’s environmental school, Jonathan Overpeck, said the growing extent and intensity of severe wildfires “is much less due to bad management and is instead the result of our baking of our forests, woodlands and grasslands with ever-worsening climate change.”
What is so disheartening — maddening, really — is that the president not only ignores a primary culprit, namely climate disruption, but he is a culprit himself in a sense, because of his withdrawal from the Paris climate accord and his total abdication of U.S. leadership in the struggle to confront the dangers of climate change.
Where can we find the hope for leadership to address climate disruption seriously, and soon? The new Congress offers modest assurance of new leadership, and Upper Valley residents will be well represented there by Reps. Annie Kuster and Peter Welch.
If there is to be hope from us citizens, we must not watch the president’s ill-informed and uncaring conduct and simply shrug and say, “there he goes again.” Let us instead persistently and vocally reject the president’s ways as an inevitable “new normal” and insist at every opportunity on good science and enlightened moral awareness in Washington and elsewhere.
Bob Schultz
Lebanon
Election Day saw an awesome number of voters and we witnessed some amazing outcomes. During these last several months crisscrossing Grafton County, I’ve had the privilege (and fun) of meeting new people, walking in parades, attending community events, talking about the issues with voters and seeing some parts of this beautiful county I’ve never visited before. It’s all been great.
I am profoundly humbled and thankful to all of the Grafton County voters for your support and faith in my goal of becoming Grafton County attorney. I sincerely thank you all for getting out and voting. Also, I want to thank all of the volunteers, sign holders, contributors, supporters, letter writers and house party hosts for everything you have done to help me get here. I could not have done it without you. I also want to thank outgoing Grafton County Attorney Lara Saffo for her service, dedication and leadership, and for her friendship and support during my campaign.
I’m very grateful for the privilege of being elected as Grafton County attorney and I look forward to serving the residents of Grafton County. Again, thanks.
Marcie Hornick
Littleton, N.H.
It appears that one of our major political parties may have inadvertently hit upon a solution to the exorbitant cost of higher education.
In the just-completed election cycle alone I learned that skepticism is anti-science, gender owes nothing to biology, and human nature is both infinitely malleable and a complete fabrication. That equal opportunity and equality before the law are discriminatory, there is no logical tension between feminism and multiculturalism, and diversity does not reduce social and political cohesion. That crime is caused by almost anything but criminals, all evidence contrary to progressive orthodoxy is hate-filled lies, and that if you question any of this you are, among other very bad things, a fascist.
In other words, the Democrats have provided me with the equivalent of a college education for free.
Anthony Stimson
Lebanon