To the Editor:

Until recently, instead of referring to benign sounding “climate change,” I had been using “climate crisis.” However, the two hurricanes that battered our region with severe flash flooding, tornados, and high winds just in the past month, have opened my eyes to how drastically the situation has worsened. So now I call it the “climate catastrophe.”

We see this catastrophe unfolding here, nationwide, and globally, and worsening far faster and more severely than almost anyone expected. Massive fires, extreme heat, flash floods, and droughts are all afflicting the world in unprecedented ways.

The organization that I lead, the Coalition for Peace Action (CFPA), began a campaign called No Wars, No Warming in conjunction with the People’s Climate March attended by over 400,000 in September 2015. This campaign seeks to educate the public on the connections between militarism and the climate catastrophe.

The climate catastrophe is an existential threat in the same category as global nuclear holocaust. If anybody doubts that, just look around at events like those above. We must rapidly intensify efforts to prevent further global warming, or we face the danger of planetary extinction.

Readers wanting to join CFPA in this effort are encouraged to visit peacecoalition.org.

The Rev. Robert Moore
Witherspoon Street

The writer is executive director of the Princeton-based Coalition for Peace Action.