I’m always pleased to hear from those who read what I’ve written. Occasionally, someone has something nice to say.
A coal train slowly travels past White Bluff power plant near Redfield, Ark., Monday, June2, 2014. Arkansas environmental officials planned to meet with utility regulators later in the month to discuss how to implement an Environmental Protection Agency request to cut power plant emissions. (AP Photo/Danny Johnston)
Jaime Silta responded harshly to my recent article comparing the “settled science” of global warming with the “settled science” of eugenics. He didn't waste any time getting to his main point:
Do you want to know why you don't believe in global warming? It's because you're too old, you're conservative, and you aren't good at science. You're not very bright either.You either search for information on climate change/global warming in a biased way, such as searching for "global warming hoax" rather than "global warming evidence", which any idiot could tell you won't get you to the correct answer.
Either that or you actually have found the countless studies which show that there has been warming for the last few decades and before that.
You know what the problem with your generation is? This is your legacy. You've lived your whole lives contributing to this little problem of ours, and now you want to blame it on governments like only a conservative would, "it's just governments wanting more power" you say. But it's not too hard to see through you. You blame them, because it's too hard to blame yourself. You and your cohort have done us a great disservice, and the fact that you'll probably go to the grave denying your own role in this just goes to show how this could have happened in the first place. The ignorance of the older generation has gotten us into this mess, and you elderly fools are too slow-witted to realize what you've done three fourths of the time, it will have to either be youthful ingenuity that stops the worst of it, or youthful suffering that comes from it.
Either way, thank you legacy man.
Jaime deserves a response.
Dear Jaime,
I generally ignore letters in which I am insulted in the first paragraph. But your screed deserves a response. For starters, you are correct. I am old.
I may also be bad at science as you say. I did, though, study science for seven years in college. Scientists were different in the old days. They didn’t seek political consensus. They sought fact.
You note that countless studies show that “there has been warming for the last few decades and before that.”
At my age, a few decades is hardly epochal. But even if a climate epoch was just a few decades, you are simply wrong. There has been no warming at all for the last 19 years.
In fact, the planet has been warming since the last glaciation ended about 12,500 years ago. We are enjoying spring rather than suffering under two or three miles of ice. Aren’t we lucky?
I’m going to guess that you admire Dr. James Hansen who put global warming on the agenda with testimony before the U.S. Senate in 1988. Well, I’m so old I remember when Hansen was warning us about global cooling.
Dr. Arnold Reitze from Case Western Reserve University predicted, “We will be forced to sacrifice democracy.” He said that, Jaime. I didn’t.
Can you guess the cause of that existential threat to humanity? It was humans burning fossil fuel. That’s right. CO2 caused global cooling 45 years ago. Today it’s global warming.
Aren’t computer models amazing? They can be programmed to produce exactly the outcome you are seeking.
You might convince me to believe in the global warming scam if you would show me just one replicable empirical study that proves the climate sensitivity of CO2. Just one.
Three years ago the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reduced its estimate by 25 percent. It’s still a guess.
Explain to me why temperature changes precede CO2 changes by about 800 years. Which is cause and which is effect?
While you’re at it, since ice core data show that temperature and CO2 have increased and decreased in a similar pattern for 400,000 years, tell us who was burning fossil fuels 400,000 years ago?
Explain to me why the Cambrian Period, 543 million years ago, was the most prolific time for life in the history of the planet. All of multicellular life forms ever known to exist were deposited in the fossil evidence in from five to 10 million years. That represents just 0.00000017 percent of the time the planet has been in existence.
And CO2 was 20 times higher than it is today. That seems to be positive not negative.
There is a story about Albert Einstein receiving a letter in which he was ridiculed for questioning Newton’s law by some of the top scientists in the world. He showed the letter to his friend grinning and said, “They might have adduced a fact.”
Adduce a fact, Jaime. Facts are always more persuasive than invective.
Happy studying.
Your ancient, slow-witted friend,
John Linder
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