In the mid 1950s, Cal Thomas was a teenager, during a period in which his adult neighbors, fearing annihilation by the Soviets’ atomic arsenal, constructed underground bomb shelters. My sense in reading his columns is that young Cal was placed in one of these bomb shelters to avoid the red menace, with enough food and water for a lifetime, but with no windows and no contact with the outside world other than a vacuum tube with which to shoot his writings. I believe he remains there, trapped in the mid-20th century, continuing to believe that Communists are civilization's biggest threat.

His Aug. 1 column − "Wrong predictions don't deter the predictors" −  demonstrates this longtime lack of interaction with the real world. There is no other way to explain his complete ignorance of the drastic, increasingly dangerous and unprecedented weather occurrences throughout the planet, some of which we observe in our own neighborhoods.

Would someone please let this man out of his bomb shelter so he too can observe and experience the extreme heat, wildfires destroying cities and homes and producing smoke across the country, droughts, increasingly violent thunderstorms, floods, empty lakes and dried up rivers, mountains devoid of previous snow-covered peaks, disappearing glaciers, a melting polar icecap, rising and warmer oceans, more frequent and deadly hurricanes, and world famine and hunger?

Perhaps then he’ll realize that Communists and liberals are not the main threat to civilization.

Thomas A. Covill

Waterford