Clyde Burnett, Peak to Peak. The recent United Nations IPBES media report announces: Nature’s dangerous decline unprecedented. Transformative changes needed to restore and protect nature.

The IPBES chair, Sir Robert Watson, states, “We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihood, food security, health and quality of life worldwide. By transformative changes we mean a fundamental system-wide reorganization of technological, economic, social, including paradigms, goals and values."

I contributed to a NASA workshop on stratospheric ozone research 40 years ago organized by NASA’s Bob Watson, who in 2012 became Sir Robert Watson. (See Watson scientist details in Wikipedia). In 2002 he was replaced as head of the IPCC at the request of the U.S Bush Administration, due to pressure by EXXON.

The science of global warming and climate change is clear. It has been communicated to the public and policy makers frequently. The fossil fuel industries have responded with propaganda emphasizing the overriding importance of economy. 

Electors in this democracy have in the past chosen to put the fossil industry people in powerful positions of administration and Congress. We have now lost the glaciers and experienced the extreme weather predicted by science and our high tides have demonstrated the rising sea level warned by science.

Science has explained the centuries long atmospheric lifetime of CO2 produced by the carbon cycle of plant growth and decay as well as the longer, but not so obvious, cycles of soil and ocean.  We have wasted 20 years of the time since Hansen’s warning to Congress. We can’t get that clean atmosphere back. The CO2 emission today will continue to trap heat for our grandchildren with dangerous results. 

This photo of the Atlantic beach in South Florida on January 11, 2013, was a challenging playground for my grandchildren. It is now becoming a dangerous threat. 

(Originally published in the May 16, 2019, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)