Dear editor,
I really can't believe we're still having this discussion, but here goes ... Ex post facto studies, or "after the fact," cannot prove anything with 100-per-cent certainty.
Yes, that is true. The tobacco industry used that argument forever, until people finally admitted that, OK, 97 per cent is close enough.
We aren't going to do a double blind study with people in which half of them are told to smoke, half are told not to smoke, and then count them as the smokers drop dead of cancers and various tobacco-related diseases.
It wouldn't be ethical, and it would be pointless. Ninety-seven per cent is certain enough, and we all get it.
It is the same damn thing with climate change.
The scientists of the world have reached 97-per-cent certainty that climate change IS real, and that WE are driving it. We can't just grab another planet, screw it up, and see what happens ... but wait, we have one next door!
You might think that Mercury is the hottest planet as it orbits extremely close to the sun right? Wrong.
Mercury reaches temperatures up to 426 C on the sun side, and down to -173 C on the dark side.
OK, 426 C is hot, but its neighbour Venus orbits twice as far from the sun as Mercury does, and its average temperature is 462 C not just on the day side, but on the night side, at the poles, all over the planet.
Why is this? CO2.
Venus has a thick atmosphere of CO2 that traps enough heat to turn the planet into an oven hot enough to melt lead in the air.
The next time someone tells you that, "We don't really know," tell them that we do know, and that if they ever face a bridge with a 97-per-cent probability of failure, ask if they'd cross it or not.
Justin D. Whitehead,
Comox Valley