Climate change

Dear Editor:It's summer in Australia and it's getting hotter. The worst summer since records began. Melbourne reached 109 degrees the other day. Plastic water bottles were melting in the sun. Cardiac arrests came in about every six minutes. The paramedic system was drained. Yet it's getting colder everywhere. The Midwest has been in a freeze, but California is in a winter heat wave? How much more evidence do we need? I hear from science channels on the radio that the gulf stream is falling apart. The flow from the two main reservoirs in California have been reduced. Lake Mead and Lake Powell are at record-low levels for the first time in history. For the first time, water flowing from the lakes will be reduced 75,000 acre feet, which would have supplied over 1.5 million homes. This is real, and unless we do something about this there is a very bleak future ahead for all of us. California is in drought mode. I thought it would hit the breadbasket of the U.S. first but I was wrong. Gov. Jerry Brown tells us not to flush our toilets and to take 2-minute showers while he considers fracking in the Monterey shale fields. The L.A. Times tells me a government think tank has decided that the XL pipeline poses no threat to us. I think differently and so do you. Fracking will take what we have left of our water supply and all the methane emissions that result from fracking are double trouble for global warming and for all of us. And if we are all alone out here, and we just might be, then do we not have a responsibility to safeguard this planet for the ones we leave behind? Margaret Hittinger Downey

********** Published: Feb. 6, 2014 - Volume 12 - Issue 43