Clyde Burnett, Peak to Peak.   Our planet home’s response to global warming has demonstrated increasingly costly weather disasters in addition to melting of polar ice and rising seas. Our human correction to CO2 emissions has been too little too late. It’s high time we paid the piper to prevent the complete destruction of our way of life. This damage to our bank account will compete only slightly with the mounting debt for property insurance and FEMA expenditures. Even this can be tempered by setting our sights on slightly less expensive luxuries to replace large, gas guzzling cars and five-bedroom mansions. Some slight attention to the science of our surroundings could help with a good feeling about our actions.

Nature’s universal environmental science laws are ultimately in control of these climate changes. Our human societies have become a part of Nature by virtue of a population of over 7 billion. Our science education has enjoyed various levels of government support over the years. The U.S. Air Corps arranged for my training in weather reconnaissance. My physics education was dependent on 3 years of the GI Bill. My atmospheric research was supported by the National Science Foundation for my summer salary and graduate student support. Vice President Biden, in his eulogy for Senator McCain, referred frequently to the past bipartisan Congressional activity of this sort. (See photo appearing in the NSF Annual Report, 1984.

The eclipse measurements eventually became the experimental foundation for a theoretical structure of lower stratospheric chemistry).

Professor Roger Revelle explained humanity’s geophysical experiment in global warming to Senator, later Vice President, Al Gore as the foundation of his leadership regarding climate change, for which he shared a Nobel Prize. Dr. James Hansen, of NASA Goddard Space Institute, warned Congress in 1988 that we needed attention to the existing global warming and climate change. He now supports the Children’s Trust court case. Much of the scientific foundation of our existing knowledge of the greenhouse trapping of Earth’s infrared heat and the resultant global warming and climate change has been supported by past government research grants.

Biden’s eulogy emphasized McCain’s dedication to the U.S. democratic government as the hope of a civilized world. However, our existing Administration and Congress has abandoned our leadership role regarding the correction of our fossil fuel energy policy, which is responsible for the climate changes that are presently damaging the health of our planet home.

We have mistakenly elected a Congress that resisted early efforts to replace coal burning power with solar and wind. Now we have an administration that is destroying the few corrections that were accomplished.

Our personal and local society’s move to renewable energy is making a constructive correction to our flagrant atmospheric pollution of heat trapping CO2 from burning fossil fuels. We are just beginning to find intelligent leaders. But our federal government’s policy of subsidy support for the dying fossil fuel industries continues to overwhelm our efforts. The effective propaganda of those supported by the greenhouse gas emitters has generated an entrenched support of misguided voters. Only the responsible attention of an educated electorate will move our society to an intelligent path. Unfortunately, our higher and secondary education system has been insufficient, and our television media is a complete failure.

There have been clear demonstrations that our weather disasters are not necessarily 100-year affairs. Climate science promises things will be hotter and more extreme, and we can’t return to the old normal. Individuals have the ultimate responsibility to understand relevant environmental science when they make electoral decisions. The November election will indicate the degree of our democratic dedication.

(Originally published in the October 11, 2018, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)