If you need a reason to vote Democrat this year, here is a good one:Climate change, or more specifically, global warming, is real, human caused, potentially disastrous and must be addressed as an international problem.

Here is a quick summary of how we cause climate change. Human generated emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases have caused increasing concentrations of these gases in the atmosphere. The increases are measurable and indisputably human caused. The concentration increases have been shown to drive observed increases in worldwide average temperature. Sophisticated mathematical models evaluated by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecast a continuing increase of 0.1 to 0.3 degrees Celsius per decade (95% confidence) in the near future. Even a modestly competent engineer like me can build a much cruder model that yields a result in this range (mine says 0.17 degrees Celsius per decade).

The consequences of this rate of increase include sea level rise on the order of four or five feet in the next century, expansion of desert areas, and a dramatic undesirable shift in agricultural productivity.

Global warming is a solvable problem of international dimensions, but it can’t be addressed if governments like ours refuse to acknowledge that it exists.

Truman Seely

Aberdeen