Clyde Burnett, Peak to Peak. Atmospheric Scientist Katherine Hayhoe, in a New York Times column, explains that she believes in God, although there is no body to see or touch. But with climate change there are melting glaciers, rising sea levels, and extreme weather. Not a question of belief, there is solid evidence.

The Weather Channel special “Race to Save The Planet”, a discussion of climate change by presidential candidates, was a welcome departure from the lack of attention in the network television debates. Initial establishment of presence of climate change by the extreme weather facts was followed by the candidates’ statements of need for urgent attention to the problem. But then the discussion focused on the economic costs of possible solutions and adaptation, needs, and jobs with little attention to actual scientific solutions.

The possible abrupt nature of the present changes was introduced in Penn State’s Professor Alley’s 2000 book The Two-Mile Time Machine—Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future. The research on trapped air in Greenland ice has a history of climate changes in decades. That history contrasts with our schedule of concerns in the next century. The arbitrary goal of solution by 2 degrees C has been moved to 1. 5 degrees C by weather disasters. We are now at 1.24 degrees C. And the California and Australia wildfires are beyond imagination.  

Correction to the present delays will require immediate expenditures for decreasing greenhouse gas emissions and projects of forest management and carbon farming to remove atmospheric CO2. And this will compete with adaptation costs for help of people in the Gulf States and elsewhere who find themselves without shelter and food. And evacuation of the residents of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific will need a new home. Can we continue the present national debt increases? 

(Originally published in the November 14, 2019, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)