Letter to the Editor: Use the science
To the Editor:
In the November 24 issue of The Standard newspaper there were two letters to the editor espousing manmade climate change. I have some questions to be addressed to Pam Larson and Cate St. Clair, authors of those letters.
Where is the empirical evidence for anthropogenic climate change? What percentage of human activity is responsible for climate change? What would we have to do to maximize that activity to reduce the amount of carbon before industrialization? For a given proportion increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, how much warming will we get globally for a given increase of CO2 warming?
I believe in climate change, there has been climate change in the past, there is today, and there will be tomorrow. But the conundrum is the degree of human activity that contributes to any global warming. The false assumption which is built into all the computer models predicting global warming on which this case entirely rests, is that as the world warms in response to the extra CO2 or for any other reason, then less outgoing radiation will escape into space. It is contrary to reason, it is contrary to elementary physics, but that is what these computer models are told to assume.
Twenty years ago we put up a satellite, Earth Radiation Budget Experiment satellite, pointed at the Earth measuring radiation escaping from the atmosphere, outgoing radiation of all forms from Earth’s surface. There was six times as much radiation escaping into space then what the United Nations has predicated. Professor Richard Litzen, the Arthur P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences at MIT, correlated changes in surface temperatures with changes in outgoing radiation. As surface temperatures warm more radiation escaped into space, more heat is leaving the surface than being absorbed.
What about all those government agencies that support man-made global warming? The so-called “climate deniers” are castigated for not being honest, as they are funded by Big Oil. Let us talk about the money from Big Government. There is not one university receiving government grants if their research is based on the premise that there is no man-made global warming; lots and lots of dollars if that research promotes the man-made global warming narrative. Follow the money, follow the politics. Nobel prizes for proponents of man-made climate change? Again, follow the money, follow the politics. Obama won a Nobel Prize for exactly what?
In 2019, 440 scientific papers were published that cast doubt on the claims that human-caused carbon emissions are causing catastrophic climate change. From 900 AD to 1400 AD the planet was warmer than today. The Mayan civilization disappeared during this time period and those darn aliens were blamed. But using science, ice core samples, tree rings from Sweden, and soil core samples from rivers pointed to extremely high temperatures which resulted in a decades long drought that devastated the Mayans.
This scenario has repeated time and again, during the middle of the Roman Empire and in ancient Egypt. All those pyramids being built abruptly stopped for 100 years. Reason? A major climate change event which caused massive drought in Egypt, so bad that the adults were literally eating their children.
The fires in Australia and the American West? Forest managers claim it was the result of poorly managed practices of maintaining our timber-clearing brush and harvesting out dead or dying trees. And one more thing, why should the United States and Western Europe join any climate treaty when Russia and China ignore the tenets of these treaties? China, at this moment, is building dozens of coal-fired energy plants in their country and are assisting in building these plants in Africa. So, we cripple our economy and standard of living while others prosper?
You do realize that if the full terms of climate change, like the Green New Deal, are implemented, it eliminates private transportation, the livestock industry, private property ownership and a lot of goodies we have been accustomed to. California went green and when there was a demand on the energy grid, they had to go to other states and buy energy to offset the green energy grid.
The Chicken Little crowd has been crying out that the planet is going to end unless we change our ways. They have been wrong for 40 years. Check out snopes.com, which reprinted a piece from a 1922 Washington Post article about climate change, and they were predicting the same narrative we are seeing today. Please, use the science.
David M. Johnson
Waukon
