Letter to the editor: Evidence is clear of climate change - The Post Star
Letter to the editor: Evidence is clear of climate change
Really? Does anyone honestly still believe that human-caused climate change is a hoax? With temperatures reaching 116 F. in Texas, the hottest June in history world wide, half the U.S. and Canada smothered with dense smoke from forest fires, and carbon dioxide levels at 417.06 ppm, when anything above 350 ppm was considered the highest we could go without triggering serious effects, this belief is untenable.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's projections of climate change are falling short of the rapidity at which climate change is happening. Why? They can predict what happens if a certain amount of CO2 enters the atmosphere, but how about the feedback mechanisms this triggers? For instance — how do they predict the number and severity of forest fires there will be, sending an extra amount of CO2 into the atmosphere. How much particulate matter from these fires will fall on Arctic ice making it darker and causing the ice to melt instead of reflecting the heat back into space, thus opening up more dark sea and land to absorb even more heat. Feedback mechanisms such as this are speeding up climate change unpredictably.
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While we can help at home by suing LEDs, turning heat down, AC up, driving electric or hybrid vehicles, etc., our best bet to save ourselves and our planet is to elect people who will actually do something to curb the use of fossil fuels and plastics. Otherwise, our grandchildren's future is grim.
Jahnn Swanker-Gibson,
Johnstown
Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.