Howard Bloom reminds us that Mother Nature has her own way of doing things ("Climate Change Is Nature's Way," op-ed, Dec. 17). Twenty-thousand years ago, ice was one to two miles thick over New England, New York and the Upper Midwest, part of the Laurentide Ice Sheet. About 15,000 years ago, the earth started to warm and the glacier stopped advancing. A thousand or so years later there was a sudden (by geological standards) increase in the Earth's temperature and over the period of another thousand-plus years the glacier disappeared. There was so much water released by the melting ice cap that the Atlantic Ocean rose some 400 feet, more than three inches a year.
About a thousand years ago, it was warm enough that the Vikings established settlements in Greenland and did farming. The Little Ice Age started around 1200 A.D. and among the victims were those same settlements—they disappeared. Yes, Mother Nature has her ways, and we should be expanding our horizons to include what's happening in our solar system.
Should we develop alternative energy sources? Yes. Should we become more energy efficient? Absolutely. But not for climate-change reasons.
Robert Leavitt
Ridgefield, Conn.
Taken together, Harold Bloom's op-ed and Patrick Michaels's Dec. 18 op-ed "How to Manufacture a Climate Consensus" paint a picture of a corrupt scientific establishment that is arrogant, partisan, petty and self-absorbed. The first culture-of-corruption clue was the rush to deem global warming "settled science." There is, of course, no such thing as settled science and those who use that term are salesmen, not scientists.
"Climategate" exposed the lengths to which climatologists were willing to go in order to stifle debate about global warming.
Mr. Michaels adds his personal insight into the efforts by climate change bullies to marginalize and silence anyone who questioned the consensus. Equally disturbing is the manipulation of data that went into climate-forecasting models. As Mr. Bloom points out, the Earth's climate history is remarkably volatile and complex, with millions or billions of variables interacting and affecting climate patterns (e.g., the Earth's wobble as it circles the sun and the intensity of cosmic rays).
Projection models that are similar in nature to climate models are used in the investment industry with mixed results, even though there are fewer variables to model and much better historical data; just ask any former trader of subprime-related products about the accuracy and reliability of their models.
Climatologists are generating climate forecasts that could be affected by innumerable variables and they're inputting historical data that involve a great deal of guesswork. Then, the climatologists choose to wipe out the Medieval Warming Period, a time of substantial global warming that probably allowed the Vikings to sail the North Atlantic to Newfoundland.
Ray Parker
Annapolis, Md.
Wow! President Barack Obama intercedes at the climate-change summit ("Copenhagen's Lesson in Limits," Review & Outlook, Dec. 19) and, presto—the Earth cools! In less than 24 hours, he jets from the hot-headed temperatures of Copenhagen to the blizzard-of-the-decade snowstorm in Washington on Dec. 19. That's impressive leadership.
John W. Pearson
San Clemente, Calif.
Daniel Botkin's "Global Warming and an Odd Bull Moose" (op-ed, Dec. 19) is an excellent observation: Ingrained in our culture is the myth of the "delicate balance of nature." The word "balance" is misleading because it implies a state of unstable equilibrium in which any change in environment will cause an ecosystem to collapse. Instead, nature is in stable equilibrium in which ecosystems adapt to changes in the environment. Just as balancing rocks are an extremely rare phenomenon (soon to be knocked off their perch by the forces or Earth, wind or fire), delicately balanced ecosystems have long since become extinct by natural changes in the Earth's environment. In the past several billion years the delicate ecosystems have disappeared and the robust ecosystems have thrived.
Mike Posehn, Ph.D.
Penryn, Calif.
Prof. Botkin's statement "that natural ecological systems are likely to be full of surprises" supports Edward Lorenz's "strange little computer model" that in 1963 became the first example of perhaps the most significant mathematical advance made possible by computers: chaos theory. Lorenz was a professor of meteorology at MIT. His conclusion concerning the atmosphere that "prediction of the sufficiently distant future is impossible by any method" remains unrefuted. "The sufficiently distant future" prediction limit for global temperature is unknown. A New England weatherman's insight about atmospheric chaos nullifies current IPCC global-warming predictions.
Dwight Bramble
Cambridge, Mass.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 