To the Editor:
Re “In Face of Skeptics, Experts Affirm Climate Peril” (front page, Dec. 7):
Ten years ago the world was holding its breath awaiting the devastating impact of the millennium bug. Though we had been assured by countless scientific experts that this was a huge problem, we now know that the global hysteria was almost entirely baseless.
It should not be a surprise that people have second thoughts about what scientific pundits tell them about global warming, particularly when this is attended by quasi-religious fervor and denigration of those who hold an opposing view.
Gary Kitchen
Southport, England, Dec. 7, 2009
To the Editor:
Re “That Climate Change E-Mail” (editorial, Dec. 6):
What the e-mail messages hacked from British climate scientists show is that scientists, too, have human frailties and are capable of behaving in a partisan and even vindictive manner.
What they clearly do not show is anything that would alter the enormous preponderance of evidence that human-caused climate change is occurring.
Throughout 2009 I have read several articles in The Times reporting new data showing that conditions are worsening even faster than had been anticipated. There is accumulating evidence that we are losing ice sheets and glaciers faster, that sea levels have risen more and that global temperatures are rising faster than the models had predicted. Of course, these are the very consensus models that the global warming skeptics are now stridently attacking.
What the skeptics call Climategate is just another in the seemingly endless parade of phony conspiracy theories that attract attention because of their sizzle, not their substance.
Russ Weiss
West Windsor, N.J., Dec. 6, 2009
To the Editor:
Your editorial concludes, “It is also important not to let one set of purloined e-mail messages undermine the science and the clear case for action, in Washington and in Copenhagen.”
Hold on a minute. It was precisely because “one set” of opinions has been driving climate politics that the whistleblowers, not hackers, published the evidence. And it is precisely because of the type of coverage that The New York Times and other mainstream news organizations are giving the whistleblowing incident that the integrity of both the scientific and journalistic communities is being threatened.
Honest questions have been raised and honest attempts have been made to shed light on questionable claims about climate science for decades. We need to push for greater disclosure, more scrutiny, better research and a halt in the action before we jump into policy and regulatory schemes that we will deeply regret.
Michelle Michot Foss
Houston, Dec.
6, 2009
The writer, an energy economist based at the University of Texas at Austin, is a past president of both the United States and International Associations for Energy Economics.
Note from KBJ: In reply to the second letter writer, ClimateGate doesn't establish the absence of global warming. It undermines the case for global warming. It supports agnosticism, not atheism. Global warmists are in the position of theists whose evidence has been shown to be bogus. This doesn't mean that God doesn't exist; it means that the case for God's existence has been weakened.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 