Mr. Craig’s letter of Aug. 19, “Expanding seas
and deserts,” expressed the ultimate hopelessness in fighting climate change and was filled with scientific facts about rising sea levels. I did not bother to research them all since I knew some to be true and others seemed plausible enough.
He failed to mention the ice age, which kept a lot of future sea rise “on ice,” as do our polar regions now.
When climate change deniers shifted tack to pointing out that climate has always been changeable, they put themselves only partly in the hands of science. They conveniently leave out facts about carbon dioxide levels: They are as high as they were 3 million years ago, are twice the average for the past 800,000 years and have exceeded the maximum over the previous 800,000 years by more than 30 percent. Similar facts about global temperatures are omitted.
But his last paragraph is the most striking. It is true that the size of our sun dictates that when it runs out of hydrogen fuel and begins burning helium and heavier elements, it will balloon in size — though much of it just a cloud of gas — to (roughly) Mars’ orbit and if any life had survived on Earth to that point, it would be at an end. What the letter writer failed to mention is that this disaster is billions of years in the future and yes, we cannot stop it.
Fatalism is not the proper response to our global crisis. We will probably not be able to restore the Earth to conditions more suitable to us for 100 years or more, but by acting now, we should be able to slow things down enough to avoid the larger catastrophe of millions, maybe billions of homeless, starving people and mankind’s most fatalistic response: war.
Greg D’Unger
Northampton