To the editor

We read with disappointment your editorial on your National News page about your views on climate change. You implied that activists like Al Gore are riling up young people for no good reason because the facts are in dispute.

The fact that global warming is caused by carbon emissions and the results are catastrophic for life on the planet is not in dispute. The only fact in dispute is whether we have reached the tipping point of no return or whether we can act fast enough to maintain a planet that is habitable for mammals and most other higher species.

This summer the percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached 415 parts per million, the highest in human history. The past several year’s global temperatures have been the highest recorded in human history. This July was the hottest since records have been kept since 1880. Alaska sea ice completely melted and Greenland’s loss of glacier ice has melted to an extent that had not been expected until 2070. The ice in Greenland will raise ocean levels 20 feet when it all melts. Managed retreats from coastlines are taking place around the world. Vietnam, for instance, has a program moving coastal rice farmers into the cities where they now do things like start bike washing businesses. The farmers are no longer able to grow rice because of salt water flooding.

Guatemalan refugees are fleeing their country, in large part, because they can’t grow food there anymore due to years long drought. Children are starving. Four years ago, U.S. Navy Admiral Len Herring, director of the Center for Sustainable Energy, visited Fallbrook and explained that climate change is viewed by the Pentagon as the No. 1 threat to our country. The civil war in Syria began as a result of farmers having to move to the cities because they could no longer grow food because of drought.

In 2003, the heat wave in Europe killed at least 30,000 people. This year the temperature in France reached 113 degrees. The number of heat waves in France has doubled in the last 34 years and is expected to double again by 2050. Temperatures in the Eastern half of the U.S. and much of the world are expected to rise to 131 degrees every two or three years during super heat waves when global warming reaches 4 degrees Celcius by the end of the century, if we continue our current level of carbon emissions.

Young people striking for climate action are the rational ones here.

Thanks,

Joy Frew

Fallbrook Climate Action Team