Letters to the editor for Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2017

Climate change putting planet in peril

There is an inconvenient truth lost in the argument of global climate change.

The naysayers pass it off as some vast conspiracy and we need do nothing, but the facts remain. We now have hurricanes in January. Storms and droughts have become both more frequent and severe. We are now prospecting for oil in Iceland. The polar ice is melting. Warm water fish are migrating north and the partial pressure of oxygen at sea level has decreased from 30 percent to 19 percent. The algae is dying.

Proponents blame the entirety on development and industrial pollution, and while that may be, we have had these climate events in the past. They believe if we just green up a little the ship will right itself. What they fail to understand is that even if we went back today, to the footprint we had on earth in the 1700s, it would take 30 years for the earth to begin to heal.

The hard truth is that what is coming, is coming, and there is nothing we can do to stop it. Unless we ditch the denial and the blaming and start working in earnest how to adapt to survive, most of us won’t.

There is solid science to suggest that a sudden ice age can result and has occurred from these climate events, and what then? If plagues and wars and famines don’t get us first.

Kelly Jones

Carson City