The environmental red line approaches

Four years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned us what would happen if we continued to rely on fossil fuels for our energy -- something now being heavily promoted by EPA Director Scott Pruitt and the Trump administration.

The IPCC stated that if we were to burn more than 30% of our known fossil fuel reserves, we would cross an environmental “red line” by the year 2040, resulting in more extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, heat waves, rising sea levels and so on.

And if we were to burn ALL of our available fossil fuels, the IPCC said, humans would find large parts of the planet uninhabitable outdoors.

Let me repeat that. Parts of our planet would become uninhabitable out of doors.

The IPCC is a non-partisan research organization set up under the United Nations to provide an objective, scientific view of world climate change and its political and economic impacts. It relies on thousands of scientists and other experts who volunteer without pay to write and review reports about the state of the environment.

In other words, they don't benefit financially from their research. They do it for the welfare of the planet

So let's do the math. The year 2040 is not some unreachable date far out in the future. It's only 22 years from now. I’ll be dead by then in all probability but my children will be roughly my age now and my grandchildren will be younger than my children are today.

That means that for everyone who has young children or grandchildren, this is not a joke or some cruel liberal hoax. This is the future. Think about that the next time someone asks you to vote on the leaders of our government.