We can’t delay response to climate change

There is one key issue that transcends the unrelenting nonsense and tweets that our president treats us to on a daily if not hourly basis. The impending crisis of apocalyptic climate change is neither left-wing nor right-wing, Republican or Democrat.

It simply is, and it is along with the prevention of nuclear war the greatest challenge facing humanity today. Consider the recent findings published in the well respected journal “Nature” that half of all living species will be extinct by mid-century in 30 short years. A recent article titled “The Anthropocene equation” confirms that anthropogenic climate destruction is causing our earth’s climate to change 170 times faster than would happen if only natural forces were at work. One author commented “The human magnitude of climate change looks more like a meteorite strike than a gradual change.”

What’s almost as horrifying as these impending and looming realities is our government’s incomprehensible indifference to the problem and the seeming commitment and desire to accelerate a problem that the human imagination cannot even begin to come to grips with.

If you have children and grandchildren or a vested appreciation of life and nature and the glories of what this our only world can offer then you will need to become active and vocal and involved in a sustained effort to offset, mitigate and yes prevent environmental tragedy that will indeed spell of the end of civilization as we know it within just decades.

Greed, hubris, arrogance and a damning disregard for the future got us here. Sustained and pro-active democratic action involving all citizens is our lone and greatest hope. We need to start now.

Jim Sawyer

Edmonds