Dear Editor,
I would like to add to Steve Gabell’s letter in the July 14, 2021 edition of the newspaper. It is not only governments who need to treat climate change as an emergency, but everyone else needs to as well. I do bird monitoring and noticed some troubling occurrences that happened this spring. Most of the birds were almost two weeks late in their migration to our area and beyond. Some species passed right through and did not stop to eat, although, because of our extremely dry spring there were very few insects for them. Even the Robins, that usually come back very plump, were skinny and they still are. What birds that did stop devoured the seed that I had put out. I had and still have birds at my feeder that I don’t normally get through the summer. My sister, who is a Biologist out west, told me that the southern U.S. states, where a good number of birds winter or feed on migration, have had droughts for four years. There was no food for the birds to fatten up for the long trip north and they would have had to stop to feed resulting in their late arrival. A friend of mine, who lives in Northern Ontario, said that they have more birds then ever before. Probably, the birds kept going until they found food to raise their young. Birds are the best indicator of what is happening in our environment, remember, miners in the past used them to let them know when dangerous gases built up in the mines.
I also have to make a comment on the two billionaires who just went up to space in order to look at Earth from there. There I was on the weather network, seeing all the videos about extreme weather; wild fires in B.C., wild fires in Manitoba and Ontario, horrible flooding in Belgium and Germany, flash flooding in Turkey, flooding in China where people were trapped in a subway, tornado damage in Barrie, Ontario. Right in the middle, Amazon’s owner was celebrating his flight. How ironic. Both billionaires want to charge people to go to space and look at Earth. Really? Each flight will dump more carbon into the atmosphere.
Amazon also wants to send over 3,200 satellites to space and Space Ex wants to send 42,000! Again, more carbon dumped in the atmosphere. Eventually these satellites will no longer work and their orbits will decay. I think the money spent on the billionaires’ programs should have gone to bringing climate change under control, or to the program where a space shuttle is being designed and built to retrieve the old satellites. Right now, most of the satellites whose orbits decay burn up in the atmosphere. Really? All that metal, plastic, and heavy metals turn into gas in our atmosphere and that’s a good thing? No wonder our trees are dying and no wonder there is so much cancer. Those gases would eventually come down as Acid Rain. At one time something was supposed to have been done about Acid Rain, but I guess when it wasn’t newsworthy anymore, people lost interest. That is a big problem, when issues are not kept in the news, they fall by the wayside.
Lynn Paibomesai
