The grim report on sea-level rise from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and five other agencies underlines the need for the “large-scale policy changes to boost energy efficiency, clean technologies and alternatives to fossil fuels” cited in the Feb. 22 editorial “ ‘Code red’ on the climate.” A climate solution anyone can undertake is to move toward a plant-based diet, which can cut diet-related emissions. Beef and dairy cattle produce huge amounts of methane, which stays in the atmosphere for about 10 years. Over that period — the crucial decade for cutting emissions — methane will have 104 times the global warming effect of an equal amount of carbon dioxide.

Without a dietary shift away from meat, the World Resources Institute has said emissions from agriculture alone could push us past the Paris agreement’s limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius. Animal agriculture also drives deforestation, to capture more land for grazing cattle and growing their feed, which turns carbon sinks into carbon emitters and exacerbates the parallel crisis of biodiversity loss. Animals and their feed now use about 75 percent of agricultural land, but produce only 18 percent of our calories — bad news for a hungry world.

Eating for the planet’s health is good for our health, too, since a plant-based diet lowers the risk of diseases, including heart disease, diabetes and cancer.

John Clewett, Falls Church

The writer is co-lead of a Climate Reality group that examines the connections between food and climate.

Quoting White House climate adviser Gina McCarthy, the Feb. 22 editorial “ ‘Code red’ on the climate” warned that our climate crisis is “blinking code red.” Unfortunately, a lot of other crises are blinking code red, some as nearby as our local schools and others as far away as Ukraine. With so many crises everywhere, it is human nature to leave some for another day. We’ve done that far too long with climate change.

As scientists have warned for decades, the longer we ignore climate change, the more destructive it gets. Economists overwhelmingly support a carbon fee as a powerful weapon against climate change. If we don’t begin to take steps to fight climate change now, it will soon be too late to stop that “code red.” With the ensuing devastation, we might lose the ability to combat the other “code reds” that are here or will be coming.

Michael N. Wilcove, Rockville