Cynics of sea level rise engulfed by ignorance

KEL Ackland’s “thoughts and opinions” ( Letters, November 10) include “I would like to assure Michael and many others that the climate in tropical Townsville has not changed in any way shape or form. It has always been that way. I was born in Townsville in 1942 and lived in this city all of my life”. And he cites “the melodies from the Greens songbook … mistakes and exaggerations”.

Kel represents a sizeable proportion of Townsville in disbelieving climate change.

Unfortunately for them, for Townsville, and for the world, the climate sceptics are profoundly wrong.

Graphs show the Bureau of Meteorology data for Townsville ( airport) and other North Queensland towns which most of us know.

All show a heating climate, every one with the same diagnostic pattern: a flat line until heating commences in the middle of the 20th century, and with the same rate of heating: averaging 2.7 degrees per 100 years.

This evidence is incontrovertible. Townsville is heating up via man- made global warming, and our rate is 2.5 times the overall global rate of 1.1 degrees per 100 years.

Townsville is in for a beating, and nothing will change unless we do something about it, starting right now.

We had better start telling our grandkids to buckle up and get used to big cyclones like Yasi, more heatwaves in summer, heatwaves in winter, hot nights, and a rising sea along Pallarenda and the Strand ( the Coral Sea has already risen around 7cm).

Kel Ackland, in your 76- year life in Townsville you have experienced its full period of heating to date.

Kel, in primary school did you hear about King Canute, who sat by his own Strand in Denmark and told the tide to stop coming in?

Facts are facts, and no amount of sticking your head in the sand will stop the sea already rising along our Strand.

Are climate sceptics going to be part of the problem or part of the solution?

Will you take responsibility for acknowledging the global warming data, and getting your grandkids ready for a different and difficult future?

RISKY POSITION: The Strand is in danger of being inundated by rising ocean levels.