As an exercise, go to your refrigerator, unplug it and open the door. Leave it open. What happens? Stupid question, I know. The ice melts in the freezer and the food you are keeping cool and free from bacteria warms up. Leave it open for a few days and everything gets very moldy and unpleasant especially here in little ole steaming hot Arizona. How to solve the problem? Close the door. Plug the fridge back in, which in turn provides electricity and within a few hours, there's ice again and you can store food again that's safe to eat. Just for a moment think of planet earth, the one we live on, as your refrigerator. The freezer elements, which control the temperature are at the top and the bottom of the planet and are called the Arctic and the Antarctic. There's a lot of ice and every year when the sun's rays no longer touch these polar caps, they freeze. There's a lot of ice and snow. We are currently in the middle of this experiment of warming up the atmosphere of the earth, in other words leaving the fridge door open. How? By introducing more and more carbon dioxide into the air. This is the carbon dioxide that got trapped in plant life as carbon during ancient prehistoric times long before human beings came along. Basically it's energy and it's trapped in coal and gas and oil. If you walk past your air-conditioner, you can feel it pumping out heat. In Phoenix we live on a heated island and we are all helping to warm the atmosphere.

As human beings we have a very narrow temperature range where we feel comfortable. Body temperatures of anything much below 95 and above 100 and we do not do well. It's the way we work biologically. The Arctic and Antarctic ice caps keep the planet cool and control the weather. They are melting. It's a fact. Greenland is melting; the glaciers watering vast areas of the planet with fresh water are melting. This is a huge problem and will be more and more dangerous as the earth's atmosphere rises degree-by-degree and year-by-year. Either we stop warming the planet or the ice continues melting and the seas rising, and there will be more and more extreme weather conditions. We are heating up. Fires in our forests will be more frequent. The earth will be more parched. Drought conditions in Arizona will become more severe. The weather system more unpredictable. More and more people will be forced to leave those areas, which used to sustain them because of drought. Migrations will be a constant problem.

There's no quick fix. If life, as we know it, is changed by this pandemic, the consequences of global warming will be gradual, incremental and more and more disruptive. Without leadership and education, our chances of survival diminish. The longer we leave the few remedies we have at our disposal and the longer we fail to act as a global force the more the problems will accumulate.