Readers React: Don’t let terrorism take away our focus from climate change

To the editor: Your fine articles on the Paris climate-change deal reported the successes and also the very serious shortcomings of the conference on global warming. (“Climate change activists are just warming up,” Dec. 15)

This is a phenomenon like no other: It threatens to destroy civilization with forced migrations, disruptions in food production, loss of land to rising sea water and overall destruction of civil order.

Yet discussion on climate change will fade if public attention is focused on particular events such as terrorist attacks. Climate change is a threat to all nations, not just to one country or a population that can be dealt with by the actions of a single government.

We cannot think about this in the old way: All nations are affected and must act together immediately if the worst is to be avoided. Let us give up our relatively unimportant national disagreements and remember that we are one people, all having a single planet as our home.

Charles Crittenden, Lake View Terrace

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To the editor: If global warming and the potential destruction it will inflict are caused largely by human activity, it would seem logical to address the unrelenting growth in population.

The world is now inhabited by more than 7 billion people, a number expected to grow to about 10 billion by the year 2100 — and the world had just 2.5 billion humans in 1950. Some project even greater growth depending on fertility rates, medical advances, pestilence, education, religious views toward birth control and more.

Thomas Robert Malthus struggled with this as early as 1798, when he was concerned the growth in population would outgrow the availability of food. Technology has generally provided a solution to this and other concerns. Will that continue into the future? Perhaps, but it would be wise to examine the possibility that it will not.

At the very least, this topic deserves attention in the discussion on global warming. If society can provide incentives to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, why not population growth?

Stan Rieb, Torrance

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