Letters To The Editor
Climate Change Needs Debunking
Editor, Times-Dispatch: Correspondent of the Day Chris Weigard's letter, "Climate Changes Need More Than a Band-Aid," illustrates an important fact: When it comes to the environment, especially the issue of global warming, facts are irrelevant.
Anthropogenic global warming is a non-issue. What contribution humans make to climate change is so minuscule that it is irrelevant. Weigard's emphasis on the "billions of tons sent skyward" conveniently omits any mention that we are one of the smaller contributors to the atmosphere's CO2 level. Termites contribute more CO2 into the atmosphere than humans, and non-anthropogenic total CO2 input is 97 percent, plus or minus several tenths of a percent. Of this input total, virtually all but 2 percent to 3 percent is naturally scrubbed out of the atmosphere.
Weigard chastises David Hostetler for short-term thinking. However, Weigard apparently has made no effort to examine the myriad scientific data on the environment, including a study of climate history. Had he done so, some inconvenient truths would be apparent:
--Since 1998 the global temperature has gone down in spite of an increase in CO2 level.
--Correlation to sunspot activity shows a historical correlation to temperature of 76 percent, whereas the correlation between historical CO2 levels and temperature is only 22 percent.
--During the medieval warming period, when Greenland was discovered and colonized, it was warmer than climate models forecast for our future. Florida did not drown, nor did the polar bears become extinct.
--There has not been one climate model to date that has prognosticated the weather with any degree of reliable accuracy -- i.e., all models showed an increase in temperature when in fact there was a decline.
--The most glaring fact is that there is not one scientific study that proves conclusively a correlation between CO2 levels and the Earth's temperature.
Conclusion: Anthropogenic global warming is a hoax. William Ryan. Midlothian.
Single-Payer Health Is Vital First Step
Editor, Times-Dispatch: To those jokers who proclaim they are pro-life: Aren't the lives of the 22,000 people who die each year because they can't afford health care or insurance just as important as unborn babies? I know they are just as important to God.
The passage of a single-payer bill is the most important first step we can take in making health care affordable for all Americans. Follow that by reducing drastically the cost of health care and finding out why doctors and hospitals take a huge reduction in their charges when paid by insurance companies and Medicare. Richard Firth. Mechanicsville.
Recounting Obama's Inspirational Actions
Editor, Times-Dispatch: President Barack Obama has inspired me to do community service. I'd like to share my wealth of ideas to help with current challenges:
-- First, high energy costs puzzle. I thought Al Gore made it clear we should just walk or ride a bike. Maybe Obama hasn't heard that yet. I do notice he rides in quite a large vehicle. I bet that costs a bundle, even with properly inflated tires.
-- All this talk about cars is crazy. If we're walking and biking, we don't need any gas guzzlers. Maybe Obama just can't put the two together. That's fuzzy math. He should give bicycles as gifts to heads of state. I bet the queen doesn't have a mountain bike.
-- And we don't need to bail out banks. We should give Obama everyone's account number so he can take whatever he needs, at any time. America could be his personal ATM. It's a great way to share the wealth while keeping the banks green. Did I say green? We can run the banks on green electricity generated by people riding bikes while hooked to a transportation wheel. NASA can figure it out. They'll have free time soon.
-- Finally, all this talk about closing Guantanamo Bay scares my mom in Florida. Being near these detainees, she worries they'll be let loose, have a few celebratory beers (the detainees, not Mom), find their way to her neighborhood, and shoot the place up. She just replaced her home from that last hurricane. Obama should move the prisoners to Vice President Joe Biden's secret bunker at the Naval Observatory, the vice president's residence. That steel door he described sounds perfect, and we can stash them there until we find another country to take them. I'm sure that will happen any day. Carolyn Troiano. Chesterfield.
Congress Should Cap Interest Rates
Editor, Times-Dispatch: Isn't it possible for the Congress of the United States to adequately protect the interest of the general public? Must it always yield to the corporate powers? Why not cap the interest rates on credit cards in the same manner as is done in the instance of federally chartered credit unions? Michaux Wilkinson. Richmond.
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Reader Reactions
So much of the information that was presented by the original letter writer and some posters on the subject of global warming/climate change/climate crisis/climate catastrophe is old news.
Australians who were among the most avid proponents of the AGW theory are desperately trying to turn around the trend in their neck of the woods.
They have put up a terrific reader friendly web site called Watt’s Up With That.
It is only one of many, including Climate Depot that publish the works of scientists of all the disciplines who both agree and disagree with the popular theories.
An example from todays WUWT.
“William Kininmoth former head of the Bureau of meteorology National Climate Centre, pointed out that even if the atmospheric carbon dioxide were to hypothetically double (an impossibility with forecast emissions and natural cooling -ed) this would provide 0.6 degrees centrigrade of a warming effect-a small value when compared to several degrees of historical natural climate change.“
A few of the latest facts to help dispel some of the most “alarmist” bleatings of the AGWers.
January 2008 broke the record for the most snow covered area ever measured in the Northern hemisphere.
The much ballyhoed demise of the polar bears has been proven to be sheer bunk.
We are now 658 days without any sun spots.
The computer models cannot “predict” climate change with any degree of certainty 10 weeks from now never mind 20 years from now.
And the proof is always out your own window.
In order to support a theory predictions need to be made that are based on the claims of the theory, and the predictions need to happen.
I highly recommend reading ALL the diverse web sites.
And “peer reviewed” is just that. Papers reviewed by like minded people.
The IPCC for instance does not even accept papers from scientists that do not agree with the current AGW theory.
Arguing science in this forum is a waste of time. Even citizens who know and understand it have difficulty relating it in an understandable way to others.
Most don’t know methane from marmalade and just spout the latest out of date information from tv and the newspapers.
If 22,000 people die from lack of health care what about the huge number that die because of health care? Doctors kill more people than any other means of dying. So we now want a system to keep the 22,000 from dying by using a system that causes many more deaths. Does something seem wrong here? Can any one prove that the people who died without health care would have survived with it? There needs to be two sides to this argument Mr Firth.
The first indication that Richard Firth’s argument is without merit is his name-calling: To Firth, people who are pro-life are “jokers.” Demonizing or personally attacking your opponent is a sure-fire indication that your argument is specious. It is, however, a standard tactic of those on the political left.
The second indication is that he makes a false comparison based on a flawed premise. The flawed premise is that 22,000 people die each year because they can’t afford health care or insurance. I suspect that 22,000 is an ideologically-generated “statistic” rather than the truth, but I’ll stipulate to his number for the sake of argument. The fact is that statistically, everyone can afford to be treated under our current system. I don’t argue that it’s the best system, but the alleged fact that 22,000 people die for lack of health care cannot be simplistically blamed on lack of insurance. Or looking at it another way, having insurance does not guarantee that life-saving health care is the automatic result – just look at what rationing of life-saving procedures in Europe and Canada does to those who don’t meet the cutoff criteria. Projecting those results onto the U.S. population would offset the statistically small number of people cited by Firth.
The false comparison Firth makes is between deaths caused by lack of insurance, and abortions. The first (deaths due to lack of insurance) would be consequential results of impersonal policies that might – MIGHT – produce a death in a given circumstance. The second (deaths due to abortion) is a conscious choice made, one individual at a time. Abortions aren’t byproducts of failed policies or missed opportunities – they’re willful decisions to end lives. And there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.3 million of them a year. That number is a hard statistic, not an inferred one.
It would take only six days’ worth of abortions to equal the number of deaths that Firth attributes to lack of universal insurance. Like it or not, there is the matter of scale. While every death is a tragedy, to suggest that pro-lifers are somehow hypocritical or insincere because they advocate against abortion but not for universal health insurance is sophistry on stilts. Really, what an absurd argument.
Credit cards are a contract in effect. You read the terms, you sign, you get the card, and you’re responsible for the actions within those terms.
If you don’t like the terms? Don’t use one.
People just see the ends, not the means, and then complain about what’s required for them to have “everything” before they earn it. (shakes head)
Freedom comes with a price, even if that price is FAILURE!
When you say peer reviewed, that always intrigues me. Does that mean that when a political climatologist writes a paper, he is “peer reviewed” by other political climatologists who shares his agenda? Peer review should be viewed upon with suspicion - because, you don’t know who the peers are and if they are sympathetic to the author/agenda - I know how it is supposed to work - but how does it really work? With regards to peer review on the issue of global warming, it’s probably more like peer pressure.
Richard’s letter is interesting. Where does the 22,000 number come from? Based on the way government handles everything else it manages outside of its constitutional bailiwick, I have every confidence that if allowed to further manage our healthcare system (if the 22,000 number is a correct baseline) the number of deaths will probably increase dramatically because of the problems associated with the enormous bureaucracy needed to manage such a system. Keep government out of healthcare.
Good letter Carolyn. Much better than the one selected C.O.D.
Michaux, the only interest congress protects is their own.
So dswx, I guess the warm weather that occurred in the 20s and 30s, which was worse than what we have today, is attributed to what—too many cows farting methane? Oh, and how about that global icepack in the Antartic having more ice than it’s had in 10 years according to Australian scientists? Are the Australians lying? Or did some conservative go make a lot of ice and dump it up there?
Global warming is a hoax. Hunderds of scientists have debunked it scientifically and historically. Science and history have both proven that Earth’s climate is cyclical. It has nothing to do with greenhouse gases or cows farting or anything elase. Global warming is how Al Gore has made his $200 million fortune because he suckers people like you into thinking that Earth is going to die unless we stop driving cars and start wearing hemp and buying carbon credits.
Global warming is officially a hoax.
The idea that global warming is a “hoax” is absolutely ludicrous. We know that warming since the 1970s can not be solely explained by natural variation. Not solar variations, not cosmic rays. It is only when greenhouse gases are considered can the warming over the past 30+ years be explained (30 years has always been the standard for climate normals). Furthermore, every year this century is on the top-10 hottest list. Choosing 1998 as the start of a supposed trend is absurd cherry-picking of data. To have a trend, it must be statistically significant. It isn’t since 1998. On top of that, 1998 was an exceptionally strong El Nino year which just added to the global average temperature. And what is more disingenuous is to say that global temperatures have gone down since 1998. Wrong. 2005 was hotter. See
http://mind.ofdan.ca/?p=2332#more-2332
and http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/lowess2.jpg?w=490&h=362
You can not simply look for a period that fits your preconceived and unscientific ideas about climate. Ten years is way too short to determine climate trends.
The peer-reviewed science (a cornerstone of science; always has been and always will be) behind global warming is exceptionally strong. Every major professional climate science organization/society in the world agrees. That includes the National Academy of Sciences, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the American Geophysical Union and numerous international climate science societies.
As for the bogus idea about poor correlation between CO2 and the temperature trend, CO2 is a forcing on temperature especially as it has increased in the modern era. Whereas natural variation initially controlled the global trends, CO2 has now surpassed it. See the CO2-temperature correlation at http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/63/Co2-temperature-plot.svg and the corresponding trends at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/34478774@N02/3432307945/sizes/o/
As for 1000 years ago in Greenland, there are lots of climate myths about regional climate out in cyberspace. As noted by Jones and Mann (2004) [Jones, P.D., Mann, M.E., Climate Over Past Millennia, Reviews of Geophysics, 42, RG2002, doi: 10.1029/2003RG000143, 2004], arguments that such evidence supports anomalous global warmth during this time period is based on faulty logic and/or misinterpretations of the available evidence.
Stick to the *science* that has been peer-reviewed. And while everyone is entitled to their opinion, they are not entitled to their own facts (Daniel Patrick Moynihan).
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