Climate Change Is Real, Whatever The Cause

There was a meeting of the Keene City Council in about 2010 where the group was voting on a resolution Jim Duffy and I had sponsored that asked the council to endorse a commitment to back a goal of capping the planet’s atmospheric content of carbon dioxide to 350 parts per million. It passed unanimously without discussion.

At the time, this was quite an achievement because many people still hadn’t gotten to the point in their reasoning that humans could possibly be responsible for climate change. That ratio now is over 417 parts per million.

Fast forward to yesterday when yet more unseasonal flooding tore trenches in local roadways and hundreds had to be evacuated to safety (without the aid of the Bearcat, I might add). Can we at least agree that climate change is real, and happening now – whatever the cause?

Because right now, infrastructure should be the critical point of our focus. On social media there are pictures of 18-inch culverts laid bare, that clearly should have been at least 24 or 36-inch culverts to handle the torrent of raging waters. Even if human activity and the burning of fossil fuels do turn out to be the root cause of this sudden change in climate activity, it is probably too late to stop much of the inevitable damage that is bound to come. But, it isn’t too late to prepare our infrastructure to at least stave-off some of the damage and save lives that will inevitably be put at risk from the increasing number and severity of future storms.

This of course will take money, and our already-inadequate revenue system will never be able to keep up. It is essential now that we abandon the unfair and inadequate system of taxing only poor and middle-income people to fund our infrastructure – I mean on the local, state and Federal levels. Whatever the cause of climate change, it is real and we cannot ignore it.

Another fact that we can’t ignore is that, rich or poor, no one can hide from it.