This morning I listened to a weather report, not about the break in the drought in the Southwestern part of the USA, but about the warming temperatures at the very top of the planet Earth.  The North Pole forecast is for 50 degrees warmer than normal this week. For the second year in a row, the Arctic is warmer than it is supposed to be.  It’s raining today in San Diego.  The weather is the usual California perfect.  The high thermometer reading in my part of the world will be close to the 70 F. mark. So why am I worried and writing about the weather?  Is my concern today that I can’t see the Pacific Ocean or downtown San Diego from where I am sitting at my computer because we have rain today in our region?

My concern is that life is so good for those of us in the USA and in places on Earth like ours that we have huge clusters of citizens who prefer not to be concerned about global climate change. I am an old man of 81 years, and even if I live to be a hundred years old, if we all started to take seriously the problem of global climate change now, I probably won’t see the disastrous result of people refusing to believe that the Earth’s climate is warming and that the cause of the warming can be managed if we do the right things. Personally life for me probably will not change dramatically in the next 20 years, so my concern is not for myself but for others who share this planet with me.  

I was born in 1935.  The world’s population in 1930 was just over 2 billion people.  Today there are more than 7 billion of us.  The political administration coming to power next month is much less committed to doing something to control conditions that can be controlled through regulations than the Obama or the Bush administrations were willing to consider.  Some of the leaders of the Republican Party who are being put in charge of environmental agencies are either ignorant of truths that scientists are sharing with us, or they are politically afraid to acknowledge that climate change we are experiencing has something to do with the way people are managing the earth’s resources, particularly resources related to energy.  Some of the people who will be in charge of regulating industry and other factors in our country are clearly afraid to speak up and to take appropriate action.

On a clear day I can see the Pacific Ocean from where I live.  I don’t have to be brought to a place where a patch of coral reefs are dying to believe that it is happening.  We don’t have polar bears in our region, but I believe what earth scientists are telling us about what the loss of habitat for those creatures means to the health of the planet which is my home. I could go on with other scientists’ warnings about the damage we human beings are doing to our planet, but I’ve made the point that I am concerned and so should all people be concerned about the damage we are doing to our earth. One of the best gifts we can give to ourselves is to allow the message about climate change and global warming to inform us… to change us.