To the Editor, The article about the heat wave in the June 24 edition of the Times News mentioned climate change. What does history reveal about the climate? Snows are less frequent and less deep. The snow melts in a few days. The elderly inform me that the earth used to be covered with snow about three months every year. The rivers don’t freeze over anymore. Thomas Jefferson-1799.

It had been reported that fishermen and explorers who sailed the seas about Spitsbergen and the eastern arctic, all point to a radical change in climate conditions. So little ice has never been noted. The expedition all but established a record sailing as far north as 81 degrees, 29 minutes in ice free waters.

This is the farthest north ever reached with modern oceanographic apparatus. This is from an article “The Changing Arctic,” by George Nicholas Ifft, published by the American Meteorological Society in “Monthly Weather Review,” November 1922. Thousands of years ago, Pennsylvania was completely covered with ice that was at least a half mile thick. The climate changes.

Michael Rother

Brockton