Addressing The Mythology Of Climate Change. Karen McClelland welcomes Stefan Sommer and Erin Mahan of NAZCCA (Northern Arizona Climate Change Alliance) to discuss the impending climate crisis. Mahan is also Vice-President of Membership and Regulatory Affairs of SunSpec Alliance, a global trade association that brings renewables to the grid faster and makes interconnection possible.
Sommer begins the discussion by noting that greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels change the Earth’s average temperature by acting as a blanket to hold in the heat from the sun. “We’ve known this since about 1850,” he says. “The really scary thing that we now see is that the warming has accelerated. It’s hard to reverse this, but we desperately need to because we are now affecting every ecosystem on Earth. We are affecting our agricultural ecosystems. We are driving people out of their homes because they can no longer live where they once lived.”
Sommer and Mahan go on to explain that climate change can be reversed through good leadership and policies. That may be costly. But the cost is far less than the impact on health and that of rebuilding infrastructure following damage from our increasingly extreme storms and other weather events.