Re: “Some scientists brave enough to go against flow” – Letters to the editor, Campbell River Mirror Dec. 21
I am continually amazed at the ability of climate change deniers to completely ignore the scientific evidence provided to them.
I believe that these people do not have any interest in finding out exactly what they are talking about. (letter writer) Jane (Davies) starts her ‘argument’ by denigrating every scientist who works in the field if they take government funding to perform their research.
With that attitude and her reliance on no-mind denier literature for her proposition that we need more CO2, not less, should tell every rational person all they need to know about the validity of her argument.
Here we go Jane: Yes humans exhale CO2, that’s because we would die if we didn’t. CO2 will kill you if the concentration gets high enough in your blood. CO2 is not ‘critical to life’ it is critical to plant life and no, ‘the earth’ doesn’t need more of it.
No, people won’t starve if there is no CO2 in the atmosphere, plants will. People might not remember to breathe, though, if there isn’t enough of the pollutant CO2 in their bloodstream.
Yes, the CO2 levels have been much higher in the past but how can you say that nothing catastrophic happened? The last time CO2 levels were even just as high as they are now (not 10-15 times higher), there were no people on the planet.
So by that reckoning, CO2 is so dangerous it prevented humans from existing at all.
Next we come to the standard denier attempt to equate weather with climate, I will ignore because it is pointless. However, the blatant untruth that there has been no significant warming for 18 years simply cannot go unchallenged.
I seem to recall temperature records being set practically every year for the past decade and a look at actual temperature records will confirm this.
Since the planet wasn’t even around for about 8-9 billion years after the big bang, I don’t see how you can say that planetary temperatures have been fluctuating since then. Also, how come you believe the money grubbing scientists when they proposed the big bang theory?
Can you please list out the taxes ‘on anything and everything’ that are a result of climate change. One would be the revenue-neutral carbon tax that BC has. What are the others that are preventing a regular Joe from paying for green energy? And is it the tax that’s preventing it or is it because it is ‘extremely expensive to maintain?’ Don’t they maintain oil and coal fired power plants?
Now we come to something we can kind of agree on. Yes, time will certainly tell us the results. You’ve already decided it’s propaganda, so happily you don’t have to wait like the rest of us.
But the most egregious statements are contained in the final paragraph. We get a hint of Ms. Davies’ inability to understand concepts when she quotes James Hanson (who’s the father of global warming, who knew?). The quote “The dangerous threshold of greenhouse gases is actually lower than what we told you a few years ago” being used as evidence that Dr. Hanson is backtracking on climate change’s connection to CO2 is simply laughable.
Read the sentence again, Jane. The dangerous threshold (the level at which something becomes dangerous) is actually lower than what we told you (therefore the level at which greenhouse gases become dangerous is lower than what was originally thought).
Far from a backtracking, this is an increase in the level of alarm over the current situation.
The throwaway line “sometimes our estimates are off in the other direction, and the problem is not as bad as we thought,” when read in context, clearly shows that Dr. Hanson is talking about uncertainty in science, not apologizing for being wrong about the role of CO2 in climate change.
Climate change deniers seem to think that scientists are sitting in their labs, tweaking the knobs of existence so the world conforms to their demented ideas. If they would take a day or two to read a book about how science works, they would realize that scientists are simply reporting the facts that the world presents to us and working towards coming up with rational and verifiable explanations for the data.
David Ostler
Campbell River