To the Journal editor:

As parents, we dress our children appropriately for changing weather but if our child runs a 101°F temperature we immediately rush them to the doctor’s office or emergency room to lower their fever. Sadly many of us have not or will not heed the warning from our climate scientists that Earth’s rising fever will soon pass 1.5°C and is expected to reach 4-5°C by 2100.

The average human body maintains 98.6°F because our thermoregulation balances heat generation with heat loss within tight tolerances, a fever alerts us we have something bad going on. Over the past ten thousand years our planet has maintained a relatively constant core temperature though a complex thermal equilibrium feedback system, allowing nature and mankind to prosper. Starting with the industrial revolution, we punctuated Earth’s equilibrium with our exponential CO2 generation and unknowingly gave our planet a rapidly rising fever.

Many think Earth’s core temperature rising a degree or two or three is nothing since daily temperatures can drop or rise 10 degrees in ten minutes, but we can’t confuse short-term temperature fluctuations with climate change. Any long-term change greater than 1.5°C to Earth’s core temperature matters. In the year 536, Earth experienced a short duration hypothermia event when a massive volcano eruption dropped the planet’s core temperature by 2°C for 18 months, resulting in massive crop failures and massive number of people starved to death.

The Industrial Revolution greatly improved our quality of life and should be celebrated, but over the past 50 years climate scientists now understand the side effects of pumping excess greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. There is still hope, we have taken actions in the past to fix other industrial revolution side effects: the hole in the ozone layer, cleaned up industrial pollution so rivers wouldn’t spontaneously ignite, and removed DDT to save our national symbol all while improving our quality of life.

If you are concerned about Earth’s fever, regularly call and write your government representatives of your concerns. Your voice just might move our political leaders’ to look long-term and take action uniting the globe in lowering Earth’s fever.

As parents of future generations we need stop self-diagnosing and take our climate doctors’ diagnosis and suggested remedies to heart. Our grand-kids and great-grand-kids will be placed at great risk due to the devastating side effects of 4-5°C rise in Earth’s core temperature.

RON MATTSON

Marquette