Clyde Burnett, Peak to Peak. Category 5 hurricanes, triple digit temperatures, floods, and huge wildfires are evidence of climate change. The science of Earth’s response to global warming predicts these to increase as a consequence of our failure to mitigate the heat trapping of CO2.

Adaptation to normal life may be impossible for climate disasters, especially for hurricanes in the Bahamas and Carolinas. Our neighbors, nearby or beyond borders, will have increasing need for outside support of onsite recovery; failure to help will leave them no choice but migration. Financial livelihood is likely to be near impossible to cope with flooded farms, habitat damage for fishing, or ability of manual labor in dangerous heat. Normal office and school activities become impossible without expensive energy use for air conditioning.  Seniors and those with health problems become unable to cope with high temperatures. Our costs of adaptation are becoming problematic for the families that can least afford it. 

Do survivors understand climate change problems or causes? Do our leaders, present or potential, understand?

Climate Quiz

Question:  How should we control CO2 emission when we produce electrical power?

Answer:     1. Solar, wind, and nuclear power emit no CO2.

2. Wood and other biofuels are renewable. They have a carbon cycle where the CO2 emitted is eventually sequestered to carbon in forest or other plant growth.   

3.  For a given amount of power, burning natural gas, with four hydrogen atoms for each carbon atom, emits about one-half the amount of CO2 as coal. 

But no fossil fuel is renewable. 

(Originally published in the September 26, 2019, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)