Thank you, Ramona

We would like to give a heartfelt “Thank you” to all the people who have helped us during this challenging time.

From those people who bravely came to our aid during the Pit Bull Dog Attack in front of the Ramona K-Mart on Tuesday evening, Nov. 5. And to the First Responders, Sheriff’s Officers, Animal Control Officers, and those who have helped with identifying and locating the dogs’ owner (who still is on the run with one of the dogs, the most aggressive dog was captured by Animal Control).

And a Special Thank You to our Family and Friends with great gratitude to all who have donated to our Go Fund Me account, and the many prayers and concern.

You all have been a Blessing and have touched us beyond words. We can never thank you enough.

May God Bless you now and always, Mike, Dee, and Ruger.

To the owner of the pit bulls, try to be a responsible adult, dog owner and citizen and contact San Diego County Animal Control and the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office regarding this incident.

Dee Dougherty

Ramona

Make change at Thanksgiving

For we Americans, Thanksgiving is like sitting on a railroad track and once a year declaring how grateful we are that a train didn’t come and run us down. Another year goes by and we just sit on that same track waiting and being thankful.

With climate Crisis desiccating the world, fires burning everywhere and refugees on our borders looking for a way to survive, all harbingers of things to come unless we do something soon. But what if we understood that one thing could push the climate crisis ahead decades; would that motivate us to make change now? That one thing is the threat of nuclear weapons going off somewhere in the world. Not a nuclear winter as we normally understand it but instead only a few explosions pushing us directly into the climate catastrophe that many refuse to believe is happening.

We now know that only one nuclear detonation and no more than 20 (1). are guaranteed to cause catastrophic climate changes, desiccation and cooling that will plunge as many as 2 billion earthlings into famine (2). Don’t like thousands of refugees on the border, then how about millions, instead? Enough hungry people to push over the walls and disrupt all civil societies.

The likelihood for a nuclear exchange is now extremely high, perhaps between India and Pakistan, and our only chance of eliminating that risk is to reduce the number of nuclear weapons with the goal of elimination worldwide. However, what we are doing is just the opposite. We Americans have approximately 5,000 nuclear weapons stockpiled or currently deployed (3). and we are embarking on modernizing the whole system spending at least $1.7 trillion (4). Instead of reducing our stockpile and paying down the national debt, as an example, we are making more weapons, new ones at that.

In the 1960s we had 30,000 nuclear weapons and at that time our military folks declared them all necessary to protect us. Now we have 5,000 weapons and they still say the same. I am convinced that we can realistically reduce to 2,000 existing weapons deployed in a smart way, eliminating the spending and show our adversaries and friends that we are serious about saving our planet. Let’s not blame the nuclear risk on God and hope that God will fix it for us. Nuclear disarmament begins at home, and it’s a no brainer alternative to sitting on the tracks declaring our gratitude year after year.

David Patterson

Ramona, member of the San Diego Veterans for Peace

Measured on Global Warming

We buy our turkeys by the pound and table cloths by inches. Thermometers, speedometers, clocks: we use measurement every day. So do scientists. In 1958 Dave Keeling, a young researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, decided to measure atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Why? Because in 1896 a Swedish scientist named Svante Arrhenius established a connection between more CO2 in the atmosphere and higher surface temperatures on earth. Global warming, in other words. Keeling wanted to see if this greenhouse effect was increasing.

So he set up a measuring station on top of Mauna Loa in Hawaii and 60 years later it’s still recording data every day. What do the numbers show? That the CO2 concentration has increased from a yearly rate of 316 parts per million in 1959 to 410 ppm a few days ago. Moreover, the rate of increase is increasing. Fifty years ago it averaged about 1.0 ppm annually; in 2015 the rate reached 3.0 ppm for the first time.

These are facts, not made-up statistics, as measurable as your height or how much you weigh. The numbers also show a seasonal trend of higher concentrations in spring and lower ones in the fall. That’s because when the northern hemisphere, where most of the land is, bursts into leaf, every tree, shrub, and green plant absorbs CO2 all summer.

Obviously, photosynthesis helps. But the swing is only about 6.0 ppm, not enough to take us back to a time when human activity and nature were in balance. That seems to have existed before the Industrial Revolution when, according to ice core studies, CO2 levels were generally steady for centuries at around 280 ppm.

It’s humans who have to make the difference. We lead, nature responds. That’s what young people are asking of the adult generations: to lead. To respect the science and act. We could think of it as a gift of love for children and grandchildren everywhere. Not easy, but whoever said love is?

Lark Burkhart

Ramona

