In the article “Extreme weather floods Friday Harbor” published Sept. 9, Duncan Wilson says “we haven’t seen anything like this” …but this isn’t any mysterious accident out of nowhere.
If scientists who’ve been writing about climate change for over 20 years are right, we’re going to get more frequent and more severe situations like this.
Forecasts say that climate change will cause extreme weather events: that means droughts and heat waves, as well as heavier rainfall and more intense storms. I’ve read online that this past July was the hottest on record, that this year is going to be the hottest on record, and that 2014 was the hottest on record as of the end of 2014.
We had a series of lectures here last summer (2014) by scientists studying climate change who told us that temperatures will continue to go up for the foreseeable future, well beyond the end of the century. And we (the U.S. and the rest of the world) aren’t doing anything to even slow this catastrophic trend, much less reverse it.
An online article in the L.A. times quoted Barack Obama during his visit to Alaska saying “Climate change is no longer some far-off problem; it is happening here, it is happening now.”
The article also said: “John Holdren, White House director of science and technology, delivered a bleak warning at the Anchorage gathering.
He said failure to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving climate change will result in a 7-degree rise in global temperatures that will be devastating and deadly. Glaciers and the masses of ice at the poles will continue to melt, sea levels will rise, inundating island nations, coastlines and entire cities.
The warmer, more acidic oceans and seas will become barren. Vast agricultural areas will be turned to deserts, and starving, displaced hordes of refugees will swamp safer regions, such as Europe and, perhaps, the United States.
It’s time to wake up and pay attention to what is happening now. It affects us here on our little island and it affects everybody on the planet.
Joseph Tein
Friday Harbor
