Data contradicts global warming

At least once a week, the Herald publishes a letter from someone who has taken up the Al Gore line that global warming is a cataclysmic planetary emergency and we must take extraordinary steps before we meet our demise.

I would urge those who write these letters to look at the facts on the ground.

According to all five scientific agencies in the U.S. and Great Britain that track and publish global surface temperatures, NASA and NOAA among them, since 1998 there has been no statistically significant increase in the surface temperature.

The same data show that in the seven years since 2001, the surface temperature has been trending downward at a rate of 0.4 degrees per decade.

Despite the very unconvincing evidence that the planet is on its last legs, far too many people want to legislate CO2 caps that would have taxpayers spending over $1.2 trillion to fix a problem that might just be an illusion.

This is not a brief to willy-nilly dump all of the CO2 we want into the atmosphere, but a plea to look at the data before it is too late and not take actions we will regret.

Remember the law of unintended consequences. It's at work now causing food prices to skyrocket because we decided to use corn to create transportation fuel.

The legislation pending in the Congress to cap CO2 emissions will make those increases look modest indeed. Should you have any doubt about what you read here, look at Senate Bill S. 2191, the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act of 2008, which will limit U.S. emissions to 1,560 thousand tons per year by 2050 or 81 percent lower than current U.S. green house gas emissions.

Joe H. Heater

Palatine