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Warming causing extreme weather

To the editor:

Recently a tornado raced by my home missing my house by feet and plowing into my hometown of Wakefield. It tore the 200-plus-foot hockey arena roof off and dumped it into Sunday Lake. Wakefield’s first tornado had struck.

The same storm dumped 10 inches of rain on the shores of Lake Superior. Saxon Harbor was destroyed. From Ashland to Little Girls Point bridges, culverts, homes, boats, vehicles, sea-walls, and tragically, people were washed away.

Last summer the University of Wisconsin Madison offered an on-line class on the Changing Great Lakes Weather by Atmospheric Scientist Steve Ackerman and Meteorologist Margaret Mooney. Their warning about summer weather; expect more extreme rain events caused by a warming earth.

Will Steger’s Climate Generation put on a summer institute this June for science educators. Will is the last explorer who will walk to the North Pole. He is also the last to cross the Connecticut-sized Larsen B ice shelf. There is simply not enough ice to do it again. Internationally respected scientists, Drs. Santer and Jacobel, who lectured at the institute, warned us of the threats to the world’s climate as the ice sheets of Arctic, Greenland, and Antarctic, continue to shrink under the heat of climate warming greenhouse gasses.

Is it possible that the warnings of 97 percent of the world’s climate scientists are worthy of our consideration? Perhaps those quiet high-IQ geeks that went off to college with a passion to discover truth are not lying to us.

Was our storm directly attributable to climate change? Scientist will not tell us yes or no until they are 90 percent sure. Right now they can only tell us that we are warming and our warm winters and extreme heat events are driven by climate change. In fact, the drought that triggered the war in Syria is now attributed directly to global warming. We are told events like our storm are more likely.

Mother Earth will continue to heat 20 to 50 years after we stop burning coal, oil, and gas. In other words, the longer we wait, the longer our children are held hostage to an uncertain climate fate.

I am neither a Republican nor Democrat. My bumper sticker says, “Climate Voter.” We at the Citizen’s Climate Lobby and Climate Generation are getting on with the job of repairing Mother Earth’s Climate. Please join us. We have solutions.

Greyson Morrow

Wakefield

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