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LETTER: We must address climate change for future generations

'Hope lies in understanding the scale of the problem,' says letter writer
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Re: OUTDOORS: Understanding climate change requires eye to past, present, future, Nov. 24, 2024.

I appreciated Mr. Hawke’s column on climate change, and would back it up by emphasizing a couple of points.

It’s easy to find times where the weather in a region was odd for some period of time, such as the so-called Little Ice Age. That was a regional cooling period affecting only the North Atlantic region; it was not global. Those who would deny climate change’s reality (or its cause — us burning fossil fuels — or its severity) often point to such regional anomalies, or even highly local ones, as when they notice a cold week in a warm fall like we are having.

The stark truth is that the human race evolved, along with everything else, on a planet with an atmosphere that, thanks to us, no longer exists. As Mr. Hawke writes, we have to work to fix it so that some distant humans, our descendants, can again live in a supportive environment. And we also have to work to save ourselves from what is happening and what is coming.

Hope lies in understanding the scale of the problem, and then seeing that the work is in fact being done, even if it doesn’t make the news enough in these angry times.

For example, there are many new things that will replace fossil fuels. Since they usually offer many other benefits, like being far cheaper and far less damaging to our health, they are being adopted and developed by businesses and countries that wish to remain economically viable, and by regular citizens who want to stop wasting money buying fuel.

David Kempton
Newmarket