I emigrated to the U.S. in 1978. I flew in with the clothes I was wearing and a heavy box of tools which, in that day and age, I carried on as hand luggage!

Those were the days when airlines published monthly magazines. On the trans-Atlantic flight I read an article describing how burning fossil fuels was contributing to potentially disastrous global warming. Climate change science was in its infancy and debatable. In my homeland of England, a popular science journalist with the same name — Nigel Calder — wrote an influential book predicting global cooling and a new ice age. He helped produce a film titled “The Great Global Warming Swindle.”

That was 40 or more years ago. Within a few years the science was sufficiently detailed to be considered “settled.” The practical consequences are undeniable from Maine’s January storms to high temperature records being repeatedly broken throughout the U.S. and now Helene’s immense tidal surge and deluge of rain, leaving in its wake a broad swath of death and destruction.

There are no longer any credible climate change deniers in the scientific community and yet the Republican Party stubbornly refuses to acknowledge reality. Trump ridicules the notion of global warming as a “hoax.”

This is the same Republican Party which, in the 1970s, with bipartisan support, brought us the far-reaching and visionary National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act.

Regardless of our politics, we all need the Republican Party to accept that climate change is real and to engage in a sustained bipartisan effort to meet the increasingly difficult challenge of halting additional global warming. The only way I can see this happening is if the Republican Party is soundly defeated in November at every level from the local to the national. We need to force a reckoning upon it that is harsh enough to get it to abandon its reckless disregard of science and reality.

Time is running out.

Nigel Calder

Newcastle