‘Humanity has a duty’

Dear Editor:

RE: No emergency, Sept. 19.

This letter summarizes very cogently the thinking of many in the present generation(s).

The letter dismisses the threat of “dangerously rapid man-made warming.” What about dangerously slow man-made warming? The letter ridicules models because the planet only heated half as fast as the models predicted. Isn’t that a logic fault when you argue against the very existence of something by saying that it’s only half as bad as it might have been?

The closing sentence in the letter reads: “There is no climate emergency.” It’s an almost perfect concluding comment, except for two words that are missing at the end of that sentence; namely, “for us.”

I don’t wish to get into an endless spiral of refutation, opinion, scare-mongering, anti-scaremongering and model-bashing.

But I do believe that humanity has a duty to those who will follow us, to ask questions and take a much longer, multi-generational view on the most likely effects of approximately 35 billion tonnes of human-produced CO2 added annually to a life-supporting atmosphere that contains about 3,000 billion tonnes of that gas; models notwithstanding.

Terence Rothwell,
Wellington North