Let’s not deny them childhood memories

There’s a tendency as we get older to look back with nostalgia on our childhood. Some of my dearest memories come from the brisk winters of my youth.

Seen through the prism of the years, I remember the snow at that time as being deeper, the cold colder and the sky bluer than they are today. I can still feel the excitement of ice skating, sledding or playing in the snow with my friends. And to this day, I can think of nothing so blissful as after coming home half-frozen, caked with frost, to sit down to a cup of hot chocolate.

President Xi Jinping’s recent trip to Switzerland, the winter sport wonderland, got me thinking about those winters again and how nice it would be now to visit the Alps.

Of course, the president was much too busy to indulge in wintry pastimes.

After attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, he visited the United Nations Office at Geneva. He gave a wide-ranging speech on the theme of nations working together to build “a shared future for mankind”.

One topic he addressed was the environment.

“Industrialization has created material wealth never seen before, but it has also inflicted irreparable damage to the environment” he said. He spoke of the necessity of countries working together to strike a balance between man and nature.

On the day of Xi’s speech, Jan 18, the World Meteorological Organization, also in Geneva, announced that 2016 was the hottest year on record.

Temperatures worldwide were 1.1 C higher than the pre-industrial average.

For those who might think 1.1 degrees is negligible, CNN meteorologist Brandon Miller put it into perspective. “That means we are already a majority of the way to the 1.5-degree warming goal set at the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015.”

Miller presented statistics, in an article on CNN’s website, to show it was no fluke, but part of a global warming trend.

For 105 years, 1911 has reigned as the coldest year. Yet each of the past three years set a heat record — and 16 of the 17 hottest years since record-keeping began in 1880 occurred in our new millennium.

Miller quoted Michael Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University’s Earth Science Center: “The effect of human activity on our climate is ... as plain as day, as are the impacts ... it is having on us and our planet.”

NASA, the US space agency, noted in July the impact on the polar ice cap. Five of the first six months of 2016 set records for diminished Arctic ice, and during the summer melt season the ice cap covered only 60 percent of its early 1980s area.

NASA attributed the Arctic warming to greenhouse gases.

I guess the skies really were bluer and the winters colder in my childhood.

Xi is right. If we want our children to retain great memories of playing outdoors, we have to take sustained, resolute action against climate change.