Science clearly supports climate change
A letter last week on schools used climate to attack Common Cause. It is full of misstatements.
Example: "no warming for 18 full years." The author should look at measurements from international researchers and our own NASA and see that the trend is still upwards. One reason for the false hiatus is that there were few instruments in the deep oceans and arctic, where temperatures are rising faster than elsewhere.
They are now working. Taking them into account, the earth's average is still clearly upward.
The letter's author complains about costs. Yes, it costs to build wind farms or solar arrays, but once finished, little is required to support them - unlike coal, where you have to keep digging and transporting.
Please note that, even without subsidies, the business firm Lazard estimates the cost of wind power at 3.7 cents per kilowatt-hour, versus 6.1 and 6.5 for natural gas and coal.
As for storage at night or calms, there is a tremendous financial potential for the U.S. to extend the work of people like Tesla's Elon Musk to build advanced batteries that we could use and export.
And countries like Denmark have found that renewable energy technology does pay off.
Until the 20th century, average global temperature changes have occurred over the millennia. They have been understood as being closely related to factors like changes in the earth's orbit, its tilt, and volcanism. Bur since then, temperatures have been deviating more and more from those factors.
Is there a new factor that tracks that deviation? Yes, and it's the increasing CO2 in our atmosphere. The ability of CO2 to trap heat has been measured by dozens of scientists (including me).
Are we all liars?
John F. Moore
Libertyville