While I agree with Oren M. Spiegler that some of Gov. Perry’s opinions make one pause (“Perry’s problems,” Sept. 22), Mr. Spiegler can strike the fact that Perry “questions whether global warming is largely man-made” off his list of concerns.
Perry is being realistic about the highly immature science of climate change and simply voicing what has been known to be true in the climate science community for years. And that is that, while today’s science is not sufficiently advanced to reliably predict future climate, there is strong evidence that our greenhouse gas emissions have only a small impact on climate. Solar and other natural forces appear to dominate.
This is not a stance taken only by a small number of outliers. The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, the latest report of which was released Aug. 29, includes thousands of references to peer-reviewed scientific papers that completely contradict the politically correct view that a climate crisis is coming and human emissions are the cause.
Of course, natural climate change will continue and so we need to help vulnerable people adapt. But the idea that we can stop climate change is simply science fiction.
Tom Harris
Ottawa, Canada
(The author is executive director of the International Climate Science Coalition.)
Cutting P.A. aid the wrong move
Obscured in the fight over which party loves Israel more (“Perry slams Obama for endangering Israel,” Sept. 21) is a much more serious issue now before Congress: U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority.
As someone who cares deeply about the long-term security of Israel, I have been appalled at calls for cutting off funding to the Palestinian Authority, the United Nations and any nation that supports Palestinian aspirations in reaction to the recent Palestinian bid for statehood at the U.N.
Don’t these members of Congress know that the security of Israel depends on having a pragmatic Palestinian government and that such a cutoff would only undermine Abbas’ moderate regime and strengthen more radical elements like Hamas? Don’t they know that many high-level Israeli defense leaders have gone on record stating that the U.S.-trained Palestinian Authority security forces have contributed significantly to making last year the most terror free year in Israel’s history?
Stopping funding to the Palestinian Authority would be extremely dangerous for Israel. After years of calling on the Palestinians to turn away from violence, shouldn’t we applaud the Palestinian Authority for pursuing nonviolent means in its legitimate quest for a state living in peace beside Israel? Let’s work with the Palestinians, not punish them.
Eileen Kraus-Dobratz
Friendship
What's your take on Evolution? Perry seems to question the science around that one as well.
Climate change has been a reality since the formation of Earth’s atmosphere. There were times when there was no ice anywhere on the planet. There were other periods when ice many miles thick covered the land and sea levels were hundreds of feet lower.
The real questions are, is today’s climate change unusual and are humanity’s carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions likely to cause dangerous climate change and more extreme weather events in the future?
Despite the implications of the UN and former Vice-President Al Gore, today’s climate change is not unusual when seen over a long time frame. Extreme weather events are not generally increasing worldwide and global warming is unlikely to cause any meaningful rise in the future. If the world does warm significantly due to humanity’s GHG emissions, and debate rages in the climate science community about whether that will happen or not, temperatures at high latitudes are forecast to increase the most, reducing the difference between arctic and tropical temperatures. Since this differential drives weather, we should see less weather extremes in a warmer world, not more.
Contrary to the impression one is left with after Gore’s “24 Hours of Reality”, there were many times in the past, long before noticeable human-induced GHG emissions, that climate change was far more severe than what we are seeing today or are likely to see in the foreseeable future:
· Coming out of the last glacial period 11 millennia ago, temperatures fell (and a thousand years later, rose) dozens of times faster than what we experienced in the twentieth century.
· Only a few thousand years ago, sea level was rising about ten times faster than it has in recent decades (global average sea level has fallen for the past two years) and human settlements on the coast had to move quickly to avoid being submerged.
· During the Little Ice Age a few centuries ago, we saw a far greater incidence of flooding, typhoons, hail storms and other extreme weather events than we see today. Canadian extreme weather expert and former Environment Canada scientist Dr. Madhav L. Khandekar explains that extreme weather events are now occurring with about the same frequency as they did during the 1945-1977 global cooling period.
· As recently as the 1930s, temperatures in the Arctic were generally higher than they are now.
· Changes in the Greenland Ice Sheet in recent years are not exceptional within the last 140 years. Research has shown that rate of ice decline over the decade 1995-2005 was no different from that of the decade 1923-1933 when atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were much lower than today.
· We are now near a 30 year low in the intensity of tropical cyclones around the world, contradicting the computerized climate model forecasts on which much of today’s concerns are based.
Khandekar is one of the contributors to an important science summary everyone interested in the topic should review. It is called the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change report (NIPCC—see www.nipccreport.com) and its latest version was released on August 29. Besides addressing several of the points above, the NIPCC concluded “…the data reveal there have not been any significant warming-induced increases in extreme weather events.” The report showed that this was the case whether the phenomenon being studied was precipitation, floods, drought, storms, hurricanes, fire, or other weather-related events.
The bottom line is that, much of the supposedly settled science on which the climate scare is based is either wrong or highly suspect.
Learn more about this at the International Climate Science Coalition Web site at:
www.climatescienceinternational.org
Tom Harris, B. Eng., M. Eng. (thermofluid sciences)
Executive Director
International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC)
P.O. Box 23013
Ottawa, Ontario
K2A 4E2
Canada
http://www.climatescienceinternational.org