After 37 years of teaching science and math, I still can’t help myself when it comes to saving articles I especially like. I have folders and notebooks on everything from elk hunting to genetics, to cancer and heart disease, to Alzheimer’s disease and to wellness. And of course, I have a fat folder on climate change. After reading that state Rep. J. Paul Brown, R-Ignacio, doubts that climate change is human-made, I pulled it out and reviewed what I had.
In that folder, I have material by Paul Douglas, a nationally respected meteorologist with over 35 years of television and radio experience. He also does a blog on weather for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He is a practicing Christian, a fiscal conservative, an advocate of small government and accountability, a believer in self-empowerment and sound science, and a Republican. I feel he is a very bright guy and an authority on climate change.
Basically, he says climate change is real and that it is “sheer lunacy” to believe that we humans can release 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air annually without any effect. In addition, he states that with that amount of pollution it’s understandable that carbon dioxide levels haven’t been higher in 800,000 years. Heat is then trapped in the atmosphere, and our weather greatly affected, as we all can attest. Much of his writing on the subject is readily available on the Internet. I encourage you to read it.
Whether a believer or not, it seems to me that we, the current species in control of our planet, should implement measures to remediate this situation. It would be far better to err on the side of caution than to leave our children and grandchildren in a world without hope. I totally agree with Douglas, who thinks every day should be Earth Day. And he closed one of his articles with the following piece of Native American wisdom: “We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.
Curt Harper
Durango
