Editor:
Re: Hot gases spew from legislature, Nov. 4 column.
Columnist Tom Fletcher’s opinion piece frames climate change as an issue of left against right.
This of course is utter twaddle. That climate change is real is accepted by essentially every reputable scientist on the planet; they can’t all be socialists. Furthermore, the vast majority of world governments, including the one currently in power in Ottawa, accept it. Just Google “Canadian government’s position on climate change.”
Is Fletcher suggesting the Harper Conservatives are left-wing zealots? The issue is not that they don’t accept climate change, they just don’t want to do anything about it.
But what I often wonder about Fletcher and his skeptical ilk is whether they ever consider the consequences for this planet of what they advocate if they are wrong and indeed the world’s scientific community is correct.
Are a few years of questionable economic gains worth the risk of delaying action on climate change, an issue upon which, contrary to Fletcher’s assertion, the jury has most assuredly delivered a verdict?
Chalmers W. Caldwell, White Rock
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In his article, columnist Tom Fletcher supports MLA Laurie Throness’s assertion that there has been 18 years with little or no global-surface temperature rise.
That is not true.
I ask Fletcher and Throness to check a world-temperature chart for themselves at www.durangobill.com/SwindlePics/SwindleRealTemp.gif. The chart shows that average temperatures are on the rise.
It also shows that 1998 was an exceptionally hot year, a stand-out at that time, although now it would be considered normal. By using 1998 for a comparison, people can say that there has been little increase.
Fletcher makes a point that carbon dioxide is a plant food and a component of exhaled breath. So it is. Carbon dioxide is taken by plants and used to construct carbohydrates and proteins.
Later, by fire or decay or being used for energy by animals like us, the carbon is oxidized and returned to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. It cycles back and forth between the atmosphere and organic matter.
But when we burn fossil fuels, we add more carbon to the mix. We change the chemistry of the air and the water. We are creating a disaster.
Fletcher has done excellent research on the natural-gas industry. I hadn’t realized how much carbon dioxide, which had been trapped in the earth, is released by gas extraction.
It’s good to see this subject – global warming – being discussed in your paper. It seems that, as the scientific evidence becomes stronger, discussion of the subject becomes less. It’s as if we are determined to stick our heads in the sand and hope for the best.
Bill McConnell, Surrey
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Another excellent column by Tom Fletcher, with just a tad of a variation suggested. Climate change is not a discussion between ‘Deniers’ and ‘Believers,’ but rather between ‘Skeptics’ and ‘Warmists’.
The term, ‘Denier’ is simply a slur invented by the GW High Priest, Elgore, as a debase-the-messenger ploy. No one ever has, no one ever can, deny that the climate is changing; it has been changing constantly for millions of years.
But let’s examine the last, say, about 75 years of climate on this Earth. Every single year of the 75, the concentration of CO2 has risen… gone up. But for the first approximately 35 years, the temperature went down, leading to projections in the 1970s of a coming ice age.
For the following, say, about 20 years – until 1998 –the temperature went up, identified as the heyday (hey-period?) of the theory of global warming, the period of irrational hysteria and also billions of dollars of GW research funds becoming available annually.
From 1998 – a very hot year, at least partly because it was an El Niño year – to the present, the average temperature has ‘paused’, flatlined, with no discernible heating or cooling.
Thus, in, say, 75 years of rising CO2, the temperature has only gone up for 27 per cent of those years.
Hence, we can state undeniably that a new consensus is sweeping the globe: the relationship between CO2 and temperature is accepted to be, at best, uncertain!
David Poole, Surrey
