Comenta el Dr. Lewis Smith al Dr. Máximo Cerame Vivas...

[OFICINA VIRTUAL APEV]

The following personal comments are inspired by the doubts of Dr. Máximo Cerame Vives as to the existence of Global Warming, as expressed in the PR Daily Sun.

You do not need a PhD, you do not need to take ice cores in Greenland and you certainly don't need a Nobel Prize, in order to be convinced that Global Warming is "for real". Here are some simple things which one can do, most of them within the capabilities of the majority of tourists. All they take are some initiative, some money and some time.

[1] Go to Miami Beach and take a tour boat around the bay at high tide. There are 21 islands in the bay. Most of them have luxury houses on them, built decades ago and each equipped with a fixed pier for small craft. The walkway of such a pier should be 12 to 18" above the water at a normal FL high tide. But nowadays at high tide, the water is lapping at the undersides of the walkways.

[2] Go to Glacier National Park. They have 11 glaciers plus photos of where the glaciers used to be, going back maybe 70 years. Compare the end of the glaciers in the photos with where the glaciers are now.

[3] Go to Alaska and visit the farmers who are getting two crops a summer of this and that. Alaska has had permanent residents for at least 12,000 years [with a verygood oral history] and the Weather Bureau for about one hundred [with good records]. Nobody in this entire history has ever gotten two crops of anything before.

[4] While you are in Alaska, go to the north coast and see the houses and piers destroyed by spring storms, because the ice is beginning to melt weeks earlier than it used to.

[5] Go to northern Michigan and talk to the people who are raising vegetables where they couldn't in their childhoods, because the weather back then was too cold.

[6] Go to the New England coastline at low tide and look for rocks with a ring of discoloration around the upper part. This is where a normal high tide used to stop. Then come back at high tide an observe that these rings are under water.

[7] Talk to any one of the 13,000 refugees from Pacific islands who have moved permanently to India or New Zealand. In their ancestral homes, where they lived for centuries, there is no longer any place to keep their feet dry, when a high tide coincides with a storm surge.

[8] Talk to any one of the 300,000 inhabitants of the Maldives Islands in the Indian Ocean. Like the boll weevil of my childhood, they are "just lookin' for a home" and doing so at a governmental level, because they can foresee the day when there is no longer any place ....

Yes, Virginia, we have a problem.

Of course, there are some uncertainties. Mostly about regional effects, what are the best remedial measures, when they will "kick in" if put into effect and how effective they will be.

So people of good will, intelligence and knowledge can certainly argue about who does what to whom, when, where, why and for how much, in order to fix the problem of Global Warming. But please, let's not be ostriches about its existence. If we don't undertake heroic measures now, it will go from "badder to worser" with in all probability, horrendous consquences.

Cordially. ###