Letter to the Editor: Change our life style or our life span will decrease

To the Editor:

It was raining the June day I arrived in Seattle in 1950. It rained day after day. I asked a native Seattleite when it stopped raining. She said usually Sea Fair week. Except for that week it rained all summer, with long, hard rains from September to May and mostly grey skies. There were lots of evergreen trees.

This pattern continued almost all year around through the 1970s. After that there were more sunny days, but still rain. In the 1980s it seemed there were lots more sunny days and less rain. When I moved into my Shoreline house in the late 1990s it was still raining sometimes during the summer which made growing fruit trees, veggies and berries easy. But now there are fewer trees since many homeowners removed evergreen trees on their lots.

This year, 2018, the temperature in my back yard was 100 degrees for almost an entire week with high 80's and 90's temperatures day after day - very different from earlier years.

Climate change has occurred, although a recent Gallup polls reports that 47% of Americans do not think believe that. The consequences will affect all of us. It is projected that we will have a warmer drier winter this year. That means a lower snow-pack and less water for the people flooding into this area. Dirty stagnant air makes breathing lethal. Costs of producing all kinds of food are increasing.

Global warming is a direct consequence of our human addiction to fossil fuels and our standard of living. We have a choice. Change our life style or our life span will decrease with much higher mortality rates. No one will escape these consequences because we are destroying the Commons – the air, land and waters of this planet.

Gini Paulsen
Shoreline