A Dark Age (Europe from A.D. 476 to the 10th century) is generally defined as replacing scientific inquiry with innuendo and rumor, intellectual stagnation, widespread ignorance and cultural decline leading to burning people at the stake who were judged heretics.

Parts of America are falling into a “Dark Age.”

Heretics are not literally being burned at the stake, but the Republican Party is symbolically “burning” its heretics, who deny former President Donald Trump’s Big Lie that he won the 2020 election (former Reps. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., and Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill.).

Books based on race, sexual and even magical (Harry Potter) content are being banned.

Lifesaving vaccines capable of preventing COVID-19 were/are ignored.

Women have become wards of the state as if living in The Handmaid’s Tale.

And, climate change is denied even as we watch more severe wildfires, cities underwater, and tornadoes destroying homes and structures at unprecedented rates.

Of all the harbingers of a Dark Age descending, denying climate change is the most ominous because global warming is altering and destroying the natural balance that sustains life on Earth.

This year, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres issued a Code Red for humanity saying, “The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable, we are unequivocally facing a climate emergency.”

This is no longer about a hypothetical future. The first three weeks of July 2023 were the hottest globally ever, by a lot.

During those three weeks, the Earth temporarily went over the 1.5C (2.7 F) tipping point. As far back as the 2015 Paris Agreement, climate scientists warned that a 1.5C increase in global temperatures would be an irreversible tipping point from which we “could not come back.”

Not coming back, according to climate scientists, means the severe heat, wildfires, droughts and storms will be/are “the new normal.”

Evidence of this Dark Age descending appeared in two May 31 letters to the editor of Noozhawk in response to my May 27 commentary, “Santa Barbara School District Needs Climate Change Curriculum.”

“Over millions of years the CO₂ record consistently shows that heat on the planet precedes CO₂, not the other way around,” one letter writer wrote. “And so to somehow blame heat rise on CO₂ is just plain incorrect. The ice records show it’s an impossibility …

“The other big problem is that no one has ever shown, much less proven, that CO₂ causes climate change. It’s an organic gas that currently is at 0.04%, and it has been much higher than that …

“The science is settled on CO₂ and its role as a secondary product of heating, not a cause.”

A second writer added: “Global warming and climate change are complete liberal lies. Blaming it on gas and oil is completely lying.”

Regarding the 0.04% CO₂ in our atmosphere, that’s the kind of misuse of facts that leads to darkness.

Actually, just 0.041% of Earth’s atmosphere is made up of CO₂. But science clearly has documented that human activities are responsible for 32% of it, and that today the level of carbon dioxide is higher than at any time in human history.

The point here is not 0.04%, but the reality that without controlling CO₂ emissions, carbon dioxide will reach 0.1% of the atmosphere by 2100, more than triple the level before the Industrial Revolution.

This would be a faster change in the Earth’s atmosphere than any time in history, with disastrous environmental consequences leading to even more severe storms, droughts and ecosystem destructions. (At 4% CO₂ is deadly).

Scientists agree that the Earth’s average temperature has already increased by about 2 F (1c) since the 1880s caused by humans releasing carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases into our atmosphere.

Indeed, global monthly average concentrations of carbon dioxide have risen from around 337 parts per million in 1979 to 417 parts per million in 2022 — an increase of more than 20% in 44 years, accounting for 76% of total greenhouse gas emissions.

Calling global warming “liberal lies” puts climate change in the context of Red versus Blue, where it has no place. The science on fossil fuels — coal, oil and gas — being the largest contributors to global climate change is unanimous, including the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

They all agree that fossil fuels account for more than 75% of global greenhouse gas emissions and nearly 90% of all carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions.

If we need proof closer to home that global warming is not a hoax, climate deniers should ask themselves why the City of Santa Barbara adopted a Sea-Level Rise Adaptation Plan and Vulnerability Assessment in 2021, that predicted at the Earth’s current rate of warming the city will experience increased flooding and erosion along our shorelines because of climate change.

During the Dark Age of the Middle Ages, the Italian poet Petrarch wrote: “This sleep of forgetfulness will not last forever. When the darkness has dispersed, our descendants can come again in their former pure radiance.”

The light he was referring to exists in each of us. If we choose to use it.

We can begin by considering the environment as we cast our votes in 2024.