Going In The Wrong Direction

ITS OFFICIAL. 2016 was the hottest year on record, breaking last year's record, which broke the previous year's, and so forth. 2016 was the second hottest year in the United States, close enough to the top to cause concern. Climate change is real, its bad, and its getting worse fast. It may be too late already to do anything about it. Even if all fossil fuel burning were stopped now, global warming would continue for the next fifty years, and it will get bad. Climate change is already obvious, no matter where you live in the United States, with ever more violent weather events, and extremes. But not only are we continuing to use fossil fuels, we are increasing their use, which may be enough to destroy human life by the year 2117. And now, of course, Donald Trump might actually reverse the progress made under President Obama, which could be the final straw. Hard core American conservatism is the source of climate change denial. The incoming head of the Environmental Protection Agency should be professor Michael Mann, chairperson of the atmospheric studies department at Penn St., whose latest book is a must read, entitled: "The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial is Damaging the Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Everyone Crazy". Instead, the incoming EPA chief is a person who denies climate change, and hates the EPA, as evidently Donald J. Trump also does. If a scientist who understands climate change were placed in power, we could move ahead with rapid solar energy development, and renewing the planet's tree canopy with genetically engineered super trees which could absorb millions of times more carbon than ordinary trees. Its all possible. But the way we are currently headed, and the people who are going to form American climate policy, we are doomed, unless the rest of the world and the leader's of America's cities and states can compensate for the lack of federal programs to fight global warming. If only Jerry Brown had been elected president.