Editor:
Re: Inconvenient truths of climate change, Dec. 2 column.
In a time where virtually all of the media has been co-opted by “climate-change” alarmists, it was refreshing to read Tom Fletcher’s balanced column.
There is no denying that the climate is changing – it always has – but the notion that humans are responsible is sheer hubris on the part of the climate-change machine.
The idea that we have models that can actually show us how to control the climate temperature, when weather forecasting models struggle to get the weather right in the coming week, is almost laughable.
The hypocrisy of world leaders who spend millions polluting the air to attend climate-change conferences is really the news story that should be talked about. The NASA satellite data which continues to contradict the current climate-change hysteria is the news story that should be talked about. Falsified temperature collection on the part of the scare-mongering scientists is the news story that should be talked about.
The bottom line is we can expect the climate to change.
In the Middle Ages, England had the climate of Italy and grew grapes everywhere. Italy didn’t disappear, did it? There is a yin and a yang in play, for every part of the world that warms there will be another part that cools. Fortunately, we humans have the ability to adapt.
But to suggest we can magically control the climate to maintain the status-quo we choose flies in the face of all available scientific evidence.
We all need to be good stewards of this planet. We all need to pollute less and recycle more in whatever way we can. But let’s not fall for the politics of climate change and call it science.
Jerry Lucky, White Rock
• • •
In his column, Tom Fletcher provided us with really good news – that climate change is not really happening after-all.
But he did not name his sources, so I decided to check things out.
He claimed that temperature change has slowed to about a quarter of what the UN had estimated. I checked two websites, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA.
It seems that from 1990 to 2005, average temperatures increased about 0.3 C, as predicted. In the first half of the last decade, the rate of increase slowed some, but it appears to have picked up again, big time.
Fletcher claims that the current warming trend has been going on for 10,000 years. If that were true, the earth would have become uninhabitable long ago!
I found no evidence to support his claim that arctic ice has rebounded. It varies widely from year to year, and, of course, on a seasonal basis, but the trend seems to be towards less ice.
As for the total ice mass in Antarctica, Fletcher is correct! NASA scientists say that although the ice is melting away faster at the edges, snowfall on the continent has increased, resulting in an overall gain in ice. A scary thing is that the ocean level is rising in spite of that.
And scientists predict that, within a couple of decades, the melting will be fast enough that total ice mass in Antarctica will begin to decrease.
I wish that Fletcher were correct, but wishing will not make it so. And, as Fletcher himself pointed out, the actions being agreed upon in Paris this month are not nearly enough.
Bill McConnell, Surrey
