Climate Change: In a speeding car about to hit a brick wall

September 15, 2016

To the Editor,

Whether global warming is solar system wide (recently reported) or human caused or not, or both, or just cyclic we now face disastrous climate change. Earthquakes, tornadoes, floods, droughts are all increasing in frequency and intensity worldwide. Ask the insurance companies. How absurd that we are in a speeding car about to hit brick wall arguing whether there is one!

Recent studies show major climate change is happening most of all in the Arctic where the melting ice is like the early warning canary in the coal mine. Some scientists even say we are now at the tipping point for runaway climate change, maybe even past that point.

According to NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (N0AA), July this year was the hottest month ever recorded in 137 years. The South Pole now has C02 rates unseen in four million years (400 parts per million). Canada’s own Athabasca glacier is melting at an alarming rate. That’s reality, not conspiracy theory. Skeptics here can deny it, but ask the Inuit whose polar bear are starving. Sea levels are rising worldwide. We already have climate change refugees. It will soon be an international humanitarian crisis.

The WeatherNetwork.com recently report the Arctic ice shield that keeps carbon and methane stable (methane’s worse than C02) is rapidly melting. In 2013 the ice caps lost 41,000 square miles of ice daily (size of Kansas). Scientists measured 1 km wide columns of methane gas (once frozen under the sea) coming up from the ocean floor. Other tipping points may be just down the road. These changes already resemble five other mass extinctions in our deep geological past, but even more rapid.

In 2012 the World Bank warned us five degree Celsius warming is likely to result without drastic cuts to carbon emissions. Since it is too late to do anything once runaway greenhouse effects are noticed, why risk catastrophy?

The question is no longer is it happening, but what will we Do about it? We need to mobilize like during the Second World War to shift whole economies to renewable energy. But we lack strong leadership while powerful corporations lobby to monetize carbon, paying off media and threatening scientists to say it’s all a mirage (like they did to tobacco).

If you love your children, please search and watch Last Hours on YouTube (11 minutes, Green World Rising). And see what you think then. This is an urgent time with dire consequences. Why not err on the side of caution, if doing little or nothing means rolling the dice with humanity, civilization and the whole planet. We are committing ecocide. Let me finish by proclaiming planets not profits!

K. Richards, L’Amable