‘Sound, Credible Science’

Some letters to the editor are too long to print. And some people include long URLs in the text of their letters. Those long URLs are pretty much impossible to reproduce on paper, and useless besides. Even if we could print them, no one’s going to type a 40-character string of more or less random alphanumeric characters into their browser to check someone’s reference.

Our annual “Top Ten Stories of The Year” issue just hit the streets. It includes an abbreviated version of a long, URL-laden letter from Douglas Jackson of Bayside. It references the
Kyoto Protocol anniversary package
that we published earlier in the month (in cooperation with the good folks at the
Association of Alternative Newsweeklies
). Since Jackson’s letter takes issue with the thesis of the package and offers an alternate view of global warming, we wanted to publish it in full here.

Read it after the jump.

Editor:

Well, in defiance of being labeled as a member of the “radical earplugging lunatic fringe” in denial “that we’re messing up the world in a potentially cataclysmic fashion,” I’ll be a brave soul and step forward to state for the record that human activities have minimal impact on the world’s weather patterns (“Town Dandy,” Dec. 6). But first I must state for the record that physical facts and truths are not gained by scientific consensus. By consensus Galileo’s theory of falling objects was agreed upon, however only when astronaut Dave Scott on the Apollo 15 mission simultaneously dropped a feather and a hammer in the vacuum of the moon’s atmosphere and both hit the moon’s surface at the same time did we have concslusive proof of Galileo’s theory. Consensus does not evoke scientific fact.

The very fact that your article makes a preemptive, ad hominem attack on anyone questioning the validity of CO2 causing global warming shows just how Kafkaesque the environment has become not only in society in general, but appalingly so in the scientific community as well. Dr. Richard Linzden, the Afred P. Sloane professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT speaks of this dillema in his
op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal
in 2006 entitled “The Climate of Fear.”

OK so with that off my chest what is the single most significant factor responsible for climate change? Well, Dr. McCrone was right all along. The Sun. Proof? Here are
two
links
to the cyclical sunspot activity that has been monitored since the 1600’s:

Please note the sunspot activity on the second link indicates a peak in sunspot activity in 1998-1999. I remember the summer of 1998 quite clearly as a summer with virtually zero fog along the North Coast. The broccoli farmers were all complaining at the Arcata Farmer’s Market in August that their broccoli crop failed due to the lack of fog.

And here is
another link
to a credible scientific organization debunking the CO2 myth. By the way, the originator of the link, the Science and Environmental Policy Project was founded in 1990 by atmospheric physicist S. Fred Singer on the premise that sound, credible science must form the basis for health and environmental decisions. Gee, what a concept.

Since I don’t get the luxury of Hank I’ll merely conclude by stating plate tectonics are moving faster than any purported rise in sea levels. We are currently at an ebb state of solar activity. It was 32 degrees this morning. Ice storms in the midwest? I believe we should start relating our weather to the weather of the sun and not a molecule that at sea level makes up at most 0.7 percent of the atmosphere. By the way, why is it CO2 is not trapping the radiation off the earth on these clear mornings of late as the so-called theory claims? Because it cannot. Al please bring your hot air to Northern California. I can no longer afford to turn on my heater this winter; and it’s not even mid December.

Douglas Jackson

Bayside

This article appears in Inside Out.