Letter of the Week: To protect Mother Earth, we can’t deny climate change

I cannot imagine why anyone would want to make up climate change. As the mother of young children, I want nothing more than to believe the future is bright for them.

I want to believe that last year was not the hottest year ever recorded, but it was (U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration).

I want to think the Earth is not experiencing a mass extinction of animals, but it’s happening (Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University).

I wish very much to think our future is safe, but failure to significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the next decade will have large adverse effects on the climate that will be essentially irreversible on human timescales (Richard Somerville, Scripps Institution of Oceanography).

The degree of ignorance of climate-change deniers would be amusing if it were not contributing to so much difficulty for our children’s future.

Jennifer Brown of Prairie Village is a native of Iowa. She is a veterinarian. She and her husband, Khurram Khan, an anesthesiologist at North Kansas City Hospital, have two children, Amili, 2, and Akbar, 6.

This story was originally published September 6, 2015 at 9:00 AM with the headline "Letter of the Week: To protect Mother Earth, we can’t deny climate change."