Dear editor,
In his fan letter supporting the rants of Tom Fletcher, Bill Metner (Oct. 26) illustrates how climate change deniers will grasp at any straws to support their delusion that global warming should be of little or no concern.
Everything Mr. Metner says is skewed against science. His referencing of a July ’17 National Geographic article on the melting of Antarctica is sketchy, to say the least. I recommend that everyone read the full article and, in consideration of the ominous details of accelerating melt, even in East Antarctica long thought to be climatically inviolate, understand that Mr. Metner, like all denialists, chooses to cherry-pick comments and present them out of context.
The 16 scientists to whom he refers are deeply concerned about how fast polar warming is proceeding, and the article says much about sea level rise this century, the only uncertainty being how fast.
It seems that Mr. Metner cannot comprehend or acknowledge three critical certainties: climate change is worsening (at our great cost); climate change is primarily caused by humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions; and we have very little time to curb emissions before global civilization is itself threatened.
Perhaps he just doesn’t care about the future of the human experiment, of species’ decimation, of ocean acidification, or of an ultimate runaway greenhouse effect such as we see with Venus.
Mr. Metner needs to be reminded that science is a methodology of exceedingly careful observations over time, of astute analyses, and peer-reviewed conclusions that always lean toward the conservative view; that is, not alarmist, but certainly illuminating and perhaps alarming for thinking people.
Any particular avenue of science is not a religion, not a belief but a discipline. Thus it is that climate science, now more than 100 years old, is significant knowledge not to be shunned by denialists who either can’t, won’t, or don’t read the science — or who misunderstand it so profoundly on the basis of limited comprehension — often induced by extremist religion or politics.
Richard Youds
Comox