WARMING: Dire consequences ahead

Record-setting heat waves, searing drought over three-fourths of the country. July was the hottest month recorded in the Lower 48 states, breaking a record set during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. What’s going on, many of us wonder.

Ask a recent climate change denier: Richard Muller, professor of physics at University of California, Berkeley. He’ll tell you it’s climate change (global warming). In 2011, “following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.”

The science is clear and well-established. So are the consequences if we don’t turn around the increase in greenhouse gases: a 2.5 degree F. temperature increase in 250 years will be an 11 degree increase by the end of the century (in less than 90 years). Our grandkids would no longer have a North Idaho to swim, boat and fish in. Not with that kind of temperature increase. It would be Mexico here.

We can turn this around. How? Make the coal, oil and gas companies pay to dump the CO2 into the air. They’ll dump less and find cleaner, renewable sources of energy. As consumers we would get a monthly check that for most of us would cover the increasing price of gasoline, natural gas and electricity.

We ended apartheid, slavery and communism. We put a man on the moon. We can stop climate change.

BILL IRVING

Hayden