Dating climate deniers | The Salt Lake Tribune

This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2013, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

While it may not be possible to screen your dates for "acceptance of climate change," as Megan Kimble imagines in her entertaining "My date with a climate-change denier" (Opinion, Jan. 12), those who reject scientific evidence are poor relationship material.

Those who deny the ominously accelerating greenhouse effect are choosing to live in their own more convenient version of reality. Uncomfortable facts are excluded, straightforward facts and figures rationalized and massaged, and data cherry-picked to demonstrate opposite meanings.

These characteristic denialist behaviors are also key ingredients in dysfunctional and abusive relationships.

By mocking the overwhelming climate consensus, Kimble's hunky date showed he's the kind of guy who thinks words and facts mean exclusively what he wants them to mean — no more, no less. It goes without saying, he's hardly relationship material.

Similarly, America's political and media systems need to end their romance with the well-funded climate-denial industry. Our policies and the public discussion of them must be founded in reality, not rooted in fantasy.

This is nowhere more important than on the issue of climate change, a threat larger than any humans have faced in recorded history.

Warren Senders

Medford, Mass.