Letter: Keep facts straight on climate science

In the opinion pages, people and columnists are entitled to their opinions. But I wish the Daily Herald would screen out outright lies and egregious misrepresentation of facts. A recent letter comes to mind.

The letter ran on January 19 and was about the recent widely reported Harvard led study about what Exxon Mobile knew about Global Warming in the 70s compared with their public posture as well as the more than $30 million dollars spent on denial in the coming decades. There were 12 Exxon models, not one as the letter writer states, and those models closely agreed with university and international models from that time. As of the mid-seventies, there was scientific consensus.

The letter writer states that the models predicted a warming of 0.36 degrees and said that's where we are. The models actually predicted a warming of about 0.36 degrees Fahrenheit per decade and that is about where we are now. We are now at about 2 degrees Fahrenheit of warming and moving up quickly.

Then the letter writer goes on to apparently use the unreviewed, unscientific article from Time magazine in the 70s that said we were due to be moving to an Ice Age in the coming several thousand years. To that he adds the false information that the world was experiencing global cooling at that time. It was not. To repeat, by the mid-70s there was a scientific consensus that global warming was real and significant and multiple organizations with multiple models from the very simple to the very complex were in surprising agreement on the amount of warming expected. What was not well estimated was the destructive impact of that warming in extremes of weather.

I am really tired of reading lies and misrepresentations in the opinion section of the Herald.

Jackie Buehring

Naperville