Respond to Climate Change: "This is our generation’s life-or-death challenge," Al Gore

A Wake Forest, North Carolina, family friend and native of Maine, posted this response to The New York Times, to readers who expressed skepticism about former Vice President Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" and his recently published opinion. 

"...inaction is not an option..." wrote DonD....

Apparently, some people are throwing up their hands in surrender to the evidence about climate change.  

Al Gore wrote: The Climate Crisis Is the Battle of Our Time, and We Can Win: Things take longer to happen than you think they will, but then they happen much faster than you thought they could.

The destructive impacts of the climate crisis are now following the trajectory of that economics maxim as horrors long predicted by scientists are becoming realities.

• More destructive Category 5 hurricanes are developing
• Monster fires ignite and burn on every continent; but 
• Antarctica, ice is melting in large amounts there and in Greenland, and accelerating sea-level rise now threatens low-lying cities and island nations.
• Tropical diseases are spreading to higher latitudes. 
• Cities face drinking-water shortages. 
• The ocean is becoming warmer and more acidic, destroying coral reefs and endangering fish populations that provide vital protein consumed by about a billion people.
• Worsening droughts and biblical deluges are reducing food production and displacing millions of people. 
• Record-high temperatures threaten to render areas of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, North Africa and South Asia uninhabitable. 
• Growing migrations of climate refugees are destabilizing nations. 
• A sixth great extinction could extinguish half the species on earth.
• Finally people are recognizing that the climate is changing, and the consequences are worsening much faster than most thought was possible. 
• A record 72 percent of Americans polled say that the weather is growing more extreme.

And yet, every day we still emit more than 140 million tons of global warming pollution worldwide into the atmosphere, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 

Vice President Gore wrote, "I often echo the point made by the climate scientist James Hansen: The accumulation of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases — some of which will envelop the planet for hundreds and possibly thousands of years — is now trapping as much extra energy daily as 500,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs would release every 24 hours."

"This is the crisis we face."

Now we need to ask ourselves: Are we really helpless and unwilling to respond to the gravest threat faced by civilization? Is it time, as some have begun to counsel, to despair, surrender and focus on “adapting” to the progressive loss of the conditions that have supported the flourishing of humanity? Are we really moral cowards, easily manipulated into lethargic complacency by the huge continuing effort to deceive us into ignoring what we see with our own eyes?

More damage and losses are inevitable, no matter what we do, because carbon dioxide remains for so long in the atmosphere. So we will have to do our best to adapt to unwelcome changes. But we still retain the ability to avoid truly catastrophic, civilization-ending consequences, if we act quickly!

"This is our generation's life-or-death challenge", he wrote.

In a published response to the skeptics who responded to the Gore opinion, "DonD from Wake Forest" wrote: To the comment on 'Al Gore: The Climate Crisis Is the Battle of Our Time, and We can Win':  For many, it seems easier to be a defeatist than to "rage against the dying of the light." Sure, our biosphere has been and will continue to be damaged for decades and even centuries by what already has occurred (by pollution). But, as Al Gore has pointed out and from what I have learned from my readings of major national and international climate studies, we can prevent the truly horrendous consequences by taking recommended transformation changes, many of which are already available. 

For the benefit of our future generations, inaction is not an option.