Ignorance. The word is derived from Latin, meaning 1) a lack of knowledge, and/or 2) a disregard for what is known. When applying the word as it might describe an individual person, there is a slight dichotomy here. The first definition is clear; an ignorant person just doesn’t have information needed to speak intelligently on a given topic. The second bears the implication that the ignorant person might be informed, but has chosen to disregard some, if not all, the available knowledge.

The American public education system has a long history of providing access to information for its citizens. However, it is the second kind of ignorance that worries me, especially in this age of unchecked information. A columnist for this paper recently offered up his treatise on climate change, one that reverberates regularly in certain political arenas. In it he concedes that the temperature of planet earth has risen over recent decades. He has accepted the overwhelming evidence that our globe is warming.

However, he won’t accept any responsibility for it. He goes on to cough up theories we all read about in middle school science classes: the earth has evolved through several geological stages (we all loved the ice age, mastodons, Sabretooth tigers, and dinosaurs!). Based on this body of theoretical evidence, he concludes that it has nothing to do with human activity. Blaming people for the problem must be propaganda coming from the radical left.

Despite not being a scientist, I’ll offer a common summary of the causes of global warming: carbon dioxide and other gases we humans burn excessively form a kind of blanket that holds in the sun’s heat; combined with the destruction of the rainforest and wasteful agricultural practices (cow farts), harmful amounts of the sun’s radiation cannot escape into outer space. The melting of the ice caps and glaciers are stark and disturbing evidence of this trend.

Also in middle school science classes we learned about the water cycle, about how a puddle of water seems to disappear after the sun comes out. Of course it hasn’t disappeared. It has been transformed into water vapor, which forms clouds, which will bring more rain. So what about that gallon of gasoline you put in your lawn mower? What happens to it? And what happens to the trillions of gallons of gas burned by tractor trailers and jet planes and cars, cars, and more cars? Does it all just disappear into outer space?

In more advanced science classes we might have studied Einstein’s theory about the relationship between mass and energy. Underpinning his super complex formula of E=MC2 is the assertion that mass/matter does not “disappear” or become destroyed; rather, it turns into some other form of matter or becomes energy.

To the point, your burned up gallon of gasoline does not just disappear. It becomes part of the earth’s atmosphere and causes harm.

Critics of the Green energy movement in energy typically point to the greater prospect of nuclear energy. It is clearly the most efficient form of potential energy, they would argue, and the technology is in place to develop it as a replacement for fossil fuels. Yet there are serious reasons to be leery about nukes. We have only to look at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and in less recent history, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to understand the gravity of their concerns. Ignorance of the past would be a terrible mistake.

While political hacks beat the internet bushes to scare up fabricated evidence to discredit environmentalists, I’m putting my faith in the scientific community – those highly educated individuals who engage in the scientific method and who place Factual evidence above any kind of politics. They are the men and women who have designed the apparatus to explore the depths of our oceans and the expanse of the solar system. They are the ones who study weather patterns and save countless lives by warning us about natural and man-made disasters. They are the ones who got us through polio, the measles, and COVID-19.

The most intentionally ignorant of all people are those in positions of super wealth and power. Their end game is unique: they will be the only ones with the means to travel to another planet once we’ve made this one uninhabitable.

Pete Howard, a musician, writer, teacher, and painter, lives in Dunkirk.