Stop procrastinating on climate change

Re: “Fuel companies could make us all rich,” letter, Oct. 20.

The letter states that the ocean level has been rising steadily for as long as measurements have been made, more than 150 years. Be this as it may, the writer then goes on to assert that this is “before any rise in atmospheric C02 from burning fossil fuels.”

To the contrary, the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change determined that atmospheric CO2 concentrations have increased steadily since the beginning of the industrial era, from an annual average of 280 parts per million in the late 1700s to 401 ppm in 2015 — a 43 per cent increase over 250 years, almost all of which is due to human activities.

More recent analyses by the World Resources Institute reveals that actual CO2 emissions globally were 150 times higher in 2011 than they were in 1850. Numerous studies indicate that these trends are primarily due to fossil-fuel emissions, a conclusion that has clearly met global scientific consensus.

Indeed, while there is still scope for continued research into unresolved aspects of this phenomenon, we are at a point in the accumulation of logic and fact when it is more prudent to conclude that this association is causal and to act on the evidence. To cite a time-honoured philosophical principle: While action without thought is impulsiveness, thought without action is procrastination. Franklin White Victoria