Not too late yet to protect climate

Dear editor: Re: Studying Arctic climate change, Herald, A8, April 3 Humpty Dumpty’s falling, folks. Right here, right now! A one degree warming is changing everything fast. So what? might go the reaction. This is just one small, remote, Canadian Arctic lake. Surely, it’s no big deal.

Not so fast. Combine that significant regional finding with the study released earlier this week by the world’s top scientists in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A.

These scientists determined that the threshold for catastrophic climate change is unfortunately much lower than previously believed. Besides myriad pressing challenges brought on by a warming climate, one specific new prediction caught my eye: should we warm up to two degrees Celsius, we will also see our average per person GDP drop by 13 per cent by 2100. The world will simply be blowing a lot of money on the spiralling costs of climate change.

These scientists also say there is some hope. We can still stop Humpty Dumpty from having a great fall. It is not by having political parties attack one another’s plans.

Aggressive political jostling is a healthy part of democracy, but we are going downhill fast. Let’s hear one combined voice from all parties. Just one apolitical message that declares we will argue over everything else but when it comes to climate change we will work together and do everything to bring everybody on board with the fastest decline in greenhouse gases possible.

Humpty Dumpty will still have cracks to mend, but it might be spared the worst blows of all.

Carol Lavallee

Chelmsford, Ont.