To the editor:

Missouri’s Sen. Kit Bond recently summed up the basic Republican position on global warming saying “there’s no clear proof that human activities contribute to global warming, and forcing industry to cap emissions will only drive up prices of electricity, natural gas and gasoline.”

But consider that satellite images clearly show the Arctic ice pack and the Earth’s glaciers are receding at rates of 1 percent per year or more and have been doing so for at least the past 10 to 20 years, and this rate of ice loss surpasses anything in the geologic record in the past 10,000 years.

And as for energy cost increases, let’s be aware that global warming is producing more frequent droughts and floods and that the California wildfires are a result of a prolonged drought out west and these horrible California fires, aside from the terrible effects on those families who have lost loved ones or homes, will serve to drive up our insurance prices dramatically and that regional droughts and floods will result in ongoing farmer bailouts that taxpayers will be called on to bear and that the droughts and floods continually destroy many food crops and drive up our grain production deficit and our food prices.

It’s not really a simple issue (as the Republicans would have us believe) so much as a whole set of complex issues. I say the old rule our parents taught us applies today as always; “a stitch in time saves nine.”

Les Blevins,

Lawrence