A letter published Nov. 16 quotes the mayor of Vince, Italy, as attributing recent flooding to climate change. Yet BBC and other news reports confirm there was a tide just as high 50 years ago, and others over the decades before that. Coincidence isn’t causation.
Even if there’s a connection between industrialization and climate change, humanity won’t strip itself of the benefits of technological progress. To survive, humanity must adapt, as species adapted to the countless changes in earth’s climate over the millennia. Adaptation requires realistically attributing effect to cause.
Damage from the most recent Venice floods more directly is attributable to incompetence, inefficiency and corruption that’s delayed and magnified the cost of completing the flood barrier system Venice started decades ago. Either humanity will evolve away from its incompetence, inefficiency and corruption to adapt to climate change, or humanity will vanish, having proved unworthy in the face of Mother Nature’s unbending discipline.
Maurice Emmer
Aspen