“Climate claims are fear-mongering” (The Columbian, Our Readers’ Views, Nov. 26) claims the warning that “we have only 12 years left to address global warming” is “fear-mongering,” based on the fact that “doomsday” has not yet arrived. Like many other misinformed people, the writer of this letter does not understand that a climate “doomsday” will be many decades down the road, but if we do not act decisively now, it will be inevitable.
When we can see it happening, it will be far too late to do anything to stop it. The greenhouse gas emissions we put into the atmosphere today won’t heat up and affect us for about four decades. But they will add onto the emissions already up there, and those emissions won’t dissipate for many decades or even millennia (princeton.edu).
And the warning about having only 12 years left to make massive emissions cuts didn’t come from a former bartender; it came from the National Academy of Sciences. Making those massive emissions cuts will not only save us trillions by preventing future climate disasters (NAS), it will also create solar and wind energy that will be “essentially free” by 2030 (UBS, Financial Times, August 2018) and create 10 million good U.S. jobs (Stanford University’s solutionsproject.org).
