Editor:
I was amazed that you gave Ronald Seguin space on your opinion page. Every time someone is allowed to put forward a global warming debunking theory anywhere, it does the whole of humanity a terrible disservice.
If the warming is man made and we can do something about it we are going to look incredibly stupid when it is confirmed and it has become too late to do anything.
Don’ you think it is time that the Media started to take it seriously and educate people as to what is really at stake. For instance when all the polar ice has melted and it will happen, the oceans will have risen by 216 feet!! One of the most dramatic consequences of this that ought it to be understood is that it means Florida will cease to exist! A US research committee chaired by Bloomberg the ex Mayor of New York predicts by the year 2100 US agricultural production will have fallen by 67%. Simply put at least 200 million Americans will starve to death! It has been calculated that what is left of the Earth’s land surface after the ice has melted will be at least 50% uninhabitable because it will be too hot to live there.
Currently the perma-frost is melting at an alarming rate. When it all melts the CO2 content of the atmosphere will treble. If this melting occurs in the presence of water it produces methane gas which is 24 times worse as a global warming agent than just CO2. That is the equivalent of a 72 times increase.
Fixing global warming is relatively easy. Obviously we should be developing every option that can decrease CO2 atmospheric content because many of these will in themselves make for better lives. The greatest cure is re-afforestation on a world scale. We need to bind carbon every way we can. Part of this will entail switching from cereal crop agriculture to crops which produce as much nourishment per acre but that also require trees both as crop produces and for shade. A current example of this is coffee growing on the Big Island in Hawaii under avocado and mango trees. When the mango trees get too big they are felled and used for ornamental hardwoods.
People really need to wake up and smell the coffee as it were, unfortunately the vast majority of us are Nero’s fiddling as the Earth gradually starts to sizzle.
John Howard, Aldergrove
