Pondering the good and the bad about climate change

To The Daily Sun,

I’ve been thinking, these climate change people who with such certainty proclaim the future, also with such certainty, the cause, us! They fly in jets, drive, are driven, heat their homes, setting example of what it is we shouldn’t do. Might it not be better for them to stop doing these things as a way to set an example?

Perhaps they got it all wrong; as the climate warms, our consumption will change. Just think of it, we’ll no longer need to heat our homes in winter, or transport thousands of tons of produce cross-country, as we’ll be able to grow it here — year-round, even. Nor will seasonal travel continue, muggy and hot Florida will turn into a really large wind and solar farm; they’ll be able to shut down their ACs and head north.

But then I got sidetracked when I remembered reading about the “Little Ice Age” between 1300 and 1850; sidetracked again, I wondered how the Civil War would have gone if it had stayed cold.

Okay, I figured, it’s time to get some work done, get some coffee, have a meal. As I was drinking coffee, I remembered back some 45 years ago, life was simpler, nothing was more important than polishing my belt buckle, no one did a better job of it, no one did worse, as it didn’t matter what we thought, it was what our superiors thought. Finishing my coffee, I can still taste the freedom of doing so, deciding when I’d like to and how I like it.

Noting the vapor rising from the coffee, it came to mind that an ice age couldn’t happen, but that there was a heated ocean with a lot of water vapor being put into the atmosphere. A two-mile-thick ice sheet covering all of Canada and the upper U.S. could not have come about without excess water vapor to fall as snow. Cold upper hemisphere, hot at the equator, for thousands and thousands of years. No was around to tell the story of climate change or listen to it.

Greenland’s July ice melt was all of ½ a millimeter; at that rate, in two thousand Julys, all of three feet of the two-mile-deep ice sheet will have melted. It’s reported that the melting has raised the seas 0.5 inch since 1972; at that rate, in 1,000 years, all of Greenland’s ice will have melted, raising the seas all of 23 feet. Assuming there will be no snowfall the next 1,000 winters, even where the sun doesn’t shine, the summers there will grow quite a crop of vegetables on the 836,300 square miles of Greenland https://www.foxnews.com/science/greenland-lost-217-billion-tons-of-ice-last-month

Antarctica, with an average temperature of 14°F on the coast, 76° in the interior where the ice is 15,669 feet deep, isn’t there yet.

There is no denying climate change; we need our winter clothes still, and it is still a good day, even though the “chicken littles” are scurrying about.

Gerald Brooks

Meredith