Dear Editor:

Phil Molvar’s recent letter (“Just the Facts, Ma’am”) quotes the alchemist Paracelsus, who opined that everything is toxic, if the dosage is high enough.

According to Mr. Molvar, the “dosage” of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere (“400 parts per million”) is benign and no cause for concern.

Fact: Current CO2 level is 419 ppm.

Fact: Last eight years were the warmest on record.

He tells us that it was 5,000 ppm during the Cambrian Period and that “life flourished.”

Fact: 13 degrees Fahrenheit ... Hotter, dry land was uninhabitable.

He also comforts us by claiming that atmospheric CO2 concentrations have been “growing at about one part per million per year” for the past 200 years, and “that rate has not increased in a century and a half.”

Fact: It was 365 in 2002.

Fact: It was 400 in 2017.

Fact: It was 419 in early 2022.

Will be 500-1,000 by 2100  (IPCC projection)

Climate-change deniers like Mr. Molvar are proffering a poison pill (side effects include, but are not limited to, rising sea-levels, widespread crop failures, lethal heat waves, catastrophic weather events, mass migrations, and accelerated extinction rates).

President Biden and Congressional Democrats, adhering to scientific facts, seek to “lower the dosage” by cutting carbon emissions.

Which will you vote for, the poison or the antidote?

Bill Hammond

Barters Island