What's wrong with being kind to planet?

This is in response to Mr. Rob Gunther's letter about global warming on Jan. 19.

I understand that he is a skeptic and that there are many people who feel the same way about global warming. I feel that it is important for all Americans to educate themselves on the subject, which I am currently doing.

In order to learn more about global warming and how it affects us, I picked up the book "Hot, Flat, and Crowded" by Thomas L. Friedman. Friedman explains that global warming causes the phenomenon of 'global weirding,' as he refers to it. In conjunction with numerous scientists and experts, he describes how the rise of temperatures in the atmosphere affect weather in the most extreme ways, giving us more snow, floods, mudslides, extreme temperatures, larger hurricanes, more violent tornadoes, etc.

The effects of global warming affect how these weather patterns behave, hence the bitter temperatures and high snow totals that we have been dealing with the last two years in an area that had experienced relatively mild winters for most of my life. (I was born in 1978, therefore I was too young to remember the snows of 1979.)

If, in fact, years down the road we learn that global warming was indeed a hoax, will we really be worse off?

No one is asking Mr. Gunther to purchase anything, the Green Movement is more a change of thought. Reduce, reuse, recycle. It also includes a search for more efficient and clean energy sources that will help us break our reliance on, as Friedman puts it, countries that hate us, and offer up a more responsible energy program for the future. The search for green technologies gives the promise of jobs for skilled American workers that are currently unemployed.

If this "hoax" forces me to be considerate of my environment and leave my daughter a cleaner planet when all is said and done, then so be it. I am afraid I don't see the problem.

Karly Kirkpatrick

Elgin