I have written this letter to the editor in response to a letter in the Kitchener Post (a newspaper local to me), Climate Change Gurus Have No Evidence published on January 11, 2018 in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. I think you can tell the main points of the letter I am disagreeing with by my rebuttals.
Global Warming Gurus Have Plenty of Evidence
Last week’s global-warming-denial letter to the editor got to me because there were problems with the “facts” that Lloyd Fex used.
First of all he called Al Gore “the leading climate change advocate” which I don’t think is true. For instance, based on results, climate change advocates in Europe are much more effective since real policy changes have resulted in those countries. As well, Al Gore has been out of the spotlight of any debate for quite some time.
I almost laughed when I saw that Fex said the polar ice cap increased in size one year by 920 000 sq. ft. This is a laughably small amount compared to the size of the ice sheets. Large shopping malls can have 5 times this square footage and that is only contained by one building. 920 000 square feet is 0.03 of the size of a square mile which polar ice sheets are more properly measured in. I doubt the purported increase is even big enough to be larger than the error margins of the size change of polar ice sheets.
Fex chooses to measure the severity of hurricanes by the amount of deaths they cause. By this measure he says that 2017’s hurricane season was the 17th most severe. But this ignores advances in tracking and knowing which way a hurricane was going that have come about in the end of the 20th century and the start of the 21st.
Of course more deaths happened in the past. In the early 1900s the hurricane prone areas didn’t have that many fast cars to flee with. The space race brought us satellites to spot hurricanes long before they made landfall. Demand for better predictions have brought better hurricane track forecasts. And finally we can board up buildings given warning. So of course fewer lives are lost in this day and age. Imagine Fex’s chagrin if I chose to measure severity of a hurricane in unadjusted dollar values of damage. Of course the most recent years would have the most severe hurricanes. That’s exactly what he is trying to do to us, just with the opposite result.
He says we can easily look up his facts at the NOAA, US Weather online and YouTube. When I tried to find his .07 degrees Celsius increase in temperatures since 1970, I found climate.gov which is an NOAA site and they said that the average surface temperature of earth had increased by 0.8 degrees Celsius since 1970.
I didn’t bother checking his 0.4 m sea level rise in the last two centuries because that is worrying enough. It is especially worrying if Greenland or Antarctica with their miles of ice sheets start to go suddenly. And for low lying islands, even half a meter might spell doom.
I have used facts to correct Mr. Fex since that is all he claims to respect. Global warming is a real problem that the earth faces today.
I don’t care that some scientists deny global warming. More scientists believe in it than doubt it. There were doctors and biologists who denied the science of tobacco being bad for you. Just as there was big money to be made in tobacco, there is big money to be made in carbon releasing via big oil and gas.
