Your Opinion: On climate change, time to act is now

Dear Editor:

Do you drive through Kansas and Colorado thinking, “This was once a great inland sea about 100 million years ago?” Do we grasp geologic time? Keith Davis raises this issue in an News Tribune letter April 24. I agree. Our thinking is fuzzy on this matter.

Davis is concerned that climate change warriors do not see the geologic picture as he does. He found climate datasets that go back 542 million years. It’s been hot on earth before. CO2 levels have been very high. He admits the earth has warmed in the last 136 years, but why worry?

Homo sapiens are about 200,000 years old. Primates go back about two million years. However, recorded history is only 6,000 years old. The modern world as such is only about 600 years old and civilization as we know it is only a few hundred years old.

Whatever climate data Davis found from millions of years ago is the result of natural causes reported from scientific analysis of ice core samples, fossils, etc. Those findings posed no threat to man because we did not exist then.

In the early 1800s a French chemist discovered the heat-trapping effects of greenhouse gasses (CO2, methane and Nitrous oxide). In 1896 a Swedish scientist was the first to note that fossil fuel combustion would lead to greenhouse gasses enhancing global warming.

In the 1990s the International Panel on Climate Change was formed to study the rising temperatures of the earth and man’s role. The IPCC consists of international scientists who study the effect of climate (weather over time). They have published five reports all saying man is causing increased global warming with increased CO2 emissions. The dangers are rising seas and an adverse agricultural environment.

The relationship between atmospheric CO2 and rising global temperatures is direct. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution atmospheric CO2 has risen 40 percent. In 2016 CO2 levels are 402 ppm which is the highest level in the last 800,000 years and possibly the last 20 million years. Mr. Davis reported data that is not caused by human activity and happened long before we existed. Current warming is unnatural!

Man is causing the current rapid rise in CO2 levels and increased global temperatures! Humans are responsible for taking action. That means curtailing the burning of fossil fuels! What we do today counts, not events that happened long before we existed.

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