Ara Chutjian, PhD
AESA President
Fellow, American Physical Society
Faculty Associate, California Institute of Technology
achutjian@aesa.org
Climate Change and the Glendale City Council Election
Glendale, CALIF. (August 27, 2019) – The Armenian Engineers and Scientists of America (AESA) is deeply concerned over the cascading advance of climate-change processes occurring on our Earth. As of this writing, massive forest fires in the Brazilian Amazon, in Siberia, Alaska, and the Canary Islands are consuming O2 (oxygen), destroying the sources (that is, trees and plants) of future O2, and releasing CO2 (carbon dioxide). The resulting warming is leading to further melting of ice, reducing the Earth’s albedo, and releasing additional CO2 and CH4 (methane) frozen within ice fields and their underlying tundra.
Given this fact-based scenario, AESA encourages the Glendale Citizenry in the upcoming City Council Election to favor those candidates who have demonstrated a clear commitment to curbing Glendale’s atmospheric emissions. Most prominently, this includes using alternate sources of energy – such as solar, hydro, geothermal, wind, nuclear, and batteries – to the Grayson Power Plant, with its releases of CH4 and CO2, and its proposed $0.5B refurbishment. This will be a step towards limiting the rise of Earth’s average global temperature to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels: the agreed-upon rise set by the Paris Accord, to which the City of Glendale is a signatory.
