Letters: Climate catastrophe - Longmont Times-Call
Letters: Climate catastrophe - Longmont Times-Call
Facts don’t support belief in climate catastrophe
Ralph Josephsohn’s Aug. 7 opinion piece indicates that he embraces the climate change catastrophe narrative. It’s understandable with all the hype promoting it. However, I noted recently that Dr. Judith Curry, one of the best climate scientists around, in her latest book observes that the part of the UN IPCC Assessment Reports written by actual scientists, not the politicized summaries for policy makers, does not support such a narrative. She notes that a very vocal minority of scientists do. There is also an equally vocal contingent among journalists and politicians that support and promote the catastrophe narrative.
Maybe all the media hype about July high temperatures is what prompted Josephsohn to write his column. Anthony Watts, the meteorologist who maintains an excellent long-running web site on climate change, recently wrote an interesting article regarding those high temperatures, “Record Global Temperatures Driven by Hunga-Tonga Volcanic Water Vapor.” Watts notes that the 2022 eruption of the Hunga-Tonga volcano injected massive amounts of water vapor into the stratosphere. So much that it could take 5-10 years to fully dissipate. And since water vapor is by far the strongest greenhouse gas, global temperatures are likely being affected by its dramatic increase.
In the Aug. 10 paper, the AP’s chief climate alarmist Seth Borenstein finally took note of the eruption, but since it wasn’t caused by CO2 he tried to downplay it. In any case, the 1930s, per the EPA, saw several annual heat wave indexes in the U.S. far higher than anything since. And the highest world temperature record is still one set in 1913 when the atmospheric CO2 level was less than 75% of today’s level. The unsupported belief in climate catastrophe has resulted in irrational government energy policies that appear likely to be far more damaging than any climate change itself.
Carl Brady, Frederick
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Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.