HARLAN RICHARDS
June 6, 2018

Climate Change

I heard on the news that Ellicott City recently received 8-9 inches of rain. It was the second 1,000 year flood within two years. Doesn't that tell you something? Apparently not. I have not heard anything on the news about why there is so much extreme weather.

North Carolina recently had two feet of rain. Is that typical? Nope. Yet none of those people affected by the flooding are willing to say that something is different about our current weather patterns.

Tropical storm Alberto arrived ahead of the hurricane season. There are 17 hurricanes predicted for this season. The excessive rain in Florida is causing numerous sinkholes. It has to be scary living there right now. You never know if your house is suddenly going to collapse into a sinkhole or if your car will be swallowed up as you are driving down the road. Knowing that random, non-predictable cataclysms will occur has to be the most stressful thing imaginable. You know it's coming, you just don't know when or where. Unlike the volcanoes in Hawaii which are more predictable—you know approximately where they are going to happen and have prior warning signs—extreme weather events have no early indicators.

President Trump pulled out of the Paris Agreement on climate change and rolled back fuel economy standards for vehicles. No doubt he has taken other pro-fossil fuel actions which are going to make climate change worse. Yet I do not hear any of his supporters (even the ones who are the victims of the extreme weather) speaking out to restore sanity to Trump's policymaking. They are all stuck in their own faux reality where inconvenient truths are labeled "fake news" and Trump's daily dissembling outright lies, and hyperbole is taken as gospel truth—even though it changes from day to day.

IMHO, if there is not a wake-up call in this country come the November elections, we are doomed. I'm not usually given to dire predications but, in this case, I think it's warranted. We are heading toward an end of the world apocalypse which will hurt LaHaye's Left Behind books appear to prescient.

All I'm saying is that we've waited too long to address global warming. The effects are now upon us and if we don't act now, we will destroy yourselves as many civilizations before us have destroyed themselves.