Looming catastrophe

This letter is in response to Jim Norris's letter titled "A Greenpeace founder on climate." First of all, although Patrick Moore claims to be a Greenpeace founder, Greenpeace says that is not true. Patrick Moore's connections with Greenpeace were severed in 1986, and he has since been a paid lobbyist for industry and an adviser for The Heartland Institute. The Heartland Institute is a libertarian think tank that worked in the 1990s to discredit the health risks of smoking and has been using the tactics developed for that fight to discredit climate change. Ninety seven percent of scientists who are actually working in the field are convinced that anthropomorphic climate change is real and is happening.

While it is true that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were many times higher in geologic time frames than they are today, it is also true that we would not find those times conducive to human civilization. Temperatures were also higher making the interior of the continents unlivable for large mammals. Homo Sapiens has been around for about 200,000 years and during all of that time until we started burning fossil fuels, carbon dioxide levels have been below 300 ppm. And during the past 10,000 years or so of civilization, global temperatures have been remarkably stable.

That there has been no significant warming for the past 18 years is just not true. Carbon dioxide levels have increased to 417 ppm this past year. But bad as the increase in temperature is, worse is the increased variability that is a result of increased temperatures: more drought, more and/or bigger storms, more wildfires. Also, most of the heat and some of the CO2 is going into the oceans creating significant changes there.

This is a catastrophe in the making and solving it should truly be a nonpartisan effort.

Jacqueline Buehring

Naperville