To the Editor:

It's time to fire our "climate denier" legislators who want to add religious folk tales (or, as Minister of Doublespeak Kellyanne Conway might call them, "alternative facts") to the science education curriculum.

• Encourage your kids to read "The Journals of Lewis and Clark 1804-1806" by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Teach what the countryside looked like only 210 years ago when the U.S. population was seven million and the world population was one billion.

• The U.S. Constitution demands a census be taken every 10 years. Results: 1990: 248 million people; 2010: 308 million people. On the average, that's three million per year. Extrapolating, when a child born today reaches age 21, there will be another 63 million in the U.S. demanding food, water, housing, jobs, etc.

• Meanwhile, from 1990 to 2010, South Dakota grew by 118,000.

• Grade school science teaches byproducts of combustion are heat, CO2 and water vapor. Ignored by the deniers is the vast amount of oil, LNG, coal and nuclear fuel that is burned to produce electricity. Are you a teacher? Challenge your students to make a list of all the things that turn electricity into heat. Then remind them that none existed 150 years ago.

• A million gallon storage tank is 60 feet in diameter times 48 feet high. Yearly world oil production would fill 5.7 rows of these (abutting) tanks stretching from New York to Los Angeles. World ethanol production would fill a row of tanks stretching from Rapid City to eight miles east of Mitchell.

Last December, representatives of 195 nations met to deal with man-made global warming. If candidate Trump had attended, do you think they'd have said, "Praises for telling us what a scam this is!" or do you think they'd say "Who let that fool in the door?"

Jack H. Mueller

Chamberlain