Last month I wrote about the changing climate and how the added heat in the system is causing turbulence which is manifesting in crazy weather. There are people who do not believe in global warming. They do not believe their own lived experience. They do not believe that glaciers all over the world are melting and lakes are drying up.

I invite people who have traveled to tell us where they went and what they saw. If you visited somewhere and the glacier was fine tell us about it. If you have been west and have pictures of full reservoirs send them to the paper.

I would like to be wrong. I would like the Sahel desert to stay where it is and not swallow the country of Somalia. Everybody living on low-lying land would like to keep their home. They don’t want to be washed away. I wish the Great Salt Lake was not drying up. All these things really are happening and it’s getting worse and it’s going faster.

We can hear the International Red Cross say 7 million people in Somalia may die this year if we don’t help them and not really care. We need to care because what is happening there is already a reality here.

There are lots of places in the Southwest that are losing their wells because the water table is dropping. There are plans to divert some of the Great Lakes fresh water west to Arizona. “Great Lakes water piped to Southwest ‘our future,’ says NASA scientist (freep.com).”

There is plenty of water in the air, even in the desert. We just need to collect it better. Our investment now in technologies that pull water out of desert air will pay off if we make it scaleable. (Solar-powered system extracts drinkable water from “dry” air | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Every tiny village in the Sudan that we help with this kind of water/energy system, will make the systems more efficient and affordable. We need to make this cheap enough for people in Arizona to do it instead of tapping the Great Lakes. Since it’s a new industry we can base the manufacturing here.

If we do nothing millions will die but millions more are on the move. African refugees are flooding Europe. South American Refugees are coming here. We can’t stop them.

Think of everything we’re doing to keep them out and it isn’t working. Even under Trump they could not be kept out. We must ask ourselves “What is happening there to make them leave?” and “What would Jesus do with the refugee?”

Global warming is to blame for a lot of the migration that’s happening now.

We have to stop arguing about whether or not the Earth is getting warmer. We have to find some data we all agree is valid.

If you were to travel around Lake Erie and visit Coast Guard, weather stations and schools you could find a fairly complete record of temperature around the lake for the last 150 years. The weather station in Buffalo was opened on Nov. 1, 1870. Their data is online. You can print out the temperature of any given day from 1874 onward. The handwritten records are stored in the Buffalo State University Library. You can make an appointment to see them.

People who have done that have found that on average it has gotten warmer over the last 150 years. Precipitation has changed. Summers are drier and hotter. If you do not believe me I invite you to take this trip to Buffalo with me. We’ll go to the Library at Buffalo State University to look at the handwritten records. First look online Climate (weather.gov). and print out some data. We’ll go to the library and see how accurate it is. The person who recorded the temperature in 1874 had no reason to falsify the report. The workers at the weather station today are also trustworthy.

The Petro-Chemical companies have run a very effective misinformation campaign. Responsible people have been trying to get everyone’s attention for 40 years. The turbulence has been increasing that whole time.

The climate models predict the turbulence will become so bad it will cause the Jet Stream to shift and fold on itself. How many crops would be ruined by a hard frost in July and another in August? The arctic hit 100 degrees last year. Warm air rushes north and Arctic air rushes south.

In the 1980s we were saying that we needed to shift gradually away from fossil fuels. That if we did not change we would see more wild fires, more storms, rising sea levels and melting ice caps. Now we are saying “time’s up.” Fossil Fuels are a problem. We must stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere.

Marie Tomlinson is a Fredonia resident. Send comments to editorial@observertoday.com