Wake up call

The Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society considers this dire report conservative and warns that the actual effects of climate change could be even more severe and stranger than what the IPCC describes.
But what also happened this week? An election with conservatives claiming victory over candidates and policies that have responded to these alarms. My favorite examples are three proposed county bans on oil and gas drilling in California. San Benito and Mendocino County measures to ban fracking won overwhelmingly while Santa Barbara County’s proposed ban on oil drilling failed (with the gas industry spending $5.8 million to defeat it.)
As proposed for use in the George Washington National Forest in the Shenandoah Valley, fracking uses steam injection wells that add chemicals dissolved in millions of gallons of water and mix with tar formations that are toxic. Ground water aquifers are at risk and even earthquakes can result in places like Oklahoma.
The future of planet earth is actually in our hands and ignoring the warning signs takes us down a path of blissful self-destruction. Let us act now and put in place clean energy policies in Virginia with solar panels on our buildings and wind turbines off our coast. The wake-up alarm has sounded.