Re: 'Another point of view: Is global warming worth the anxiety on our young people?' [Village News, 9/26/19]

Halfway through your first sentence, it was clear that you have no business talking about science. Masquerading as journalism in the ‘National’ section, your poorly reasoned opinion piece is dangerously misguided.

You opine about the exorbitant cost of dealing with anthropogenic climate change, but your unbalanced editorial conveniently ignores current and future costs of sea level rise, worldwide crop failure, up to 1 billion climate migrants, increased numbers of severe weather events, loss of fisheries due to ocean pH changes and temperature rise. I need not go on.

Indeed, wrong and poorly written as it was, your climate denial piece leaves out the most severe yet likely outcome of using the atmosphere as a dump for GHGs. I suppose that even your “...professionals in science and related fields” know that no arctic ice means low albedo. When arctic sea ice reaches a summer minimum of zero in the next few years, it will start absorbing more solar energy further warming the ocean. This tipping point will cause additional climate warming feedback loops which will create more warming and more tipping points such as melted permafrost releasing huge amounts of methane which is 20x as potent as CO2 at warming the globe.

When you stack up the temperature increases, we are likely to experience over the next decades, it’s not out of the question that the earth could be 10 degrees Celsius hotter than pre-industrial levels. At least 2 degrees is already locked in and 4 degrees is much more likely. Civilization collapses long before we reach 6 degrees and we will take most of the other species with us. The sad irony of articles like yours will go unnoticed by the creatures that replace us, just as it will by my rabbits when they use it as litter box liner.

As publisher of the Village News, Julie Reeder apparently gets to drive the paper’s political bias, but it’s dishonest to pretend this is news.

Jonah Liebes