Floods, firestorms, famines will increase until we do something about global warming

Editor: We can’t kick the can down the road much longer

“God gave Noah the rainbow sign; no more water, the fire next time.”

The thoughts and images evoked by those words will be different for everyone. For a growing number of people, their thoughts and images will be deeply personal and extremely painful.

As the average global temperature increases in lockstep with the increasing atmospheric greenhouse gases, more and more people are suffering from floods, firestorms and famines.

How can anybody, especially an American president, dismiss global warming and climate change as natural phenomenon and refuse to acknowledge the burning of fossil fuels (crude oil, natural gas and coal) is a major contributing factor?

Perhaps the following calculation will startle you as much as it did me. The daily global consumption of petroleum products is close to 100 million barrels; a barrel of oil is nearly a metre high; and the moon is roughly 400 million metres away.

In other words, the amount of crude oil consumed every four to five days would fill a column of barrels reaching from the earth to the moon. Is it rational to believe the daily consumption of such a massive amount of carbon dioxide-producing fuel does not have a dramatic impact on our planet’s biosphere?

For the short term, doing nothing is the most convenient option for most of us, as well as, the most lucrative option for a politically influential elite.

But ignoring the current and future consequences of global warming will be disastrous for many of this planet’s diverse, interdependent and irreplaceable life forms, the web of life upon which human existence depends.

Ferdinand Foch, a First World War French general, said, “The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.”

That, my fellow citizens, is exactly the kind of fire the world needs right now. Lloyd Atkins,

Vernon