Re: Hamilton Spectator Letter to the Editor

I am awestruck to find the Spec giving airtime to a view which seeks to deliberately misinform its readers on the status of the scientific debate on climate change.

The writer indicates that because the Hadley Center's CRUT3v plotted against atmospheric CO2 shows a drop in temperature, while the CO2 concentration increased from about 367ppm to about 386ppm from 2002-2009 somehow invalidates the theory that CO2 causes temperature increase.

In actual fact, no reputable scientist has ever claimed such a thing. Climate is a system with more than one variable. Because other variables happen to be acting in such a way that temperature increases recently have slowed, does not invalidate any relationship between CO2 and temperature.

However, the place to debate climate science is not in the pages of the letters to the editor, it is amongst the scientific community. Every major scientific organization involved in climate research, including the science academies of 32 nations, the US National Research Council, the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, the Royal Society, the American Physical Society, and many others have agreed with the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). No scientific body of national or international standing is known to reject the basic findings of human influence on recent climate change.

If you don’t believe in the science, first convince the scientific community through such organizations that you are right and they are wrong. Then, maybe you have a case that we don’t need to take action.

Most of the denial of climate change is not driven by true scientific understanding, it is driven by fear and cowardice. Fear of making small and incremental changes in our lifestyle that are necessary in order to maintain prosperity for our children and the generations that follow. Fear of losing financial or material comforts.

Those who have put their lives on the line for this country would be ashamed that we are so passive and our leaders are so afraid to take even symbolic actions against this looming threat.