Honest mistake, dishonest reply

While David Filar in his June 2 letter was expressing amusement over Wally Degner's temperature statistics put forth in his May 24 letter, I was fuming, knowing Degner's honest yet significant mistake allowed Filar to completely misrepresent the facts.

In his letter, Degner stated, "Our weather service has been keeping track of our temperatures since 1900, which is 115 years. In that time our average temperature has gone up a degree and a half." To which, Filar responded, "That 1.5 degree average temperature change is for USA only and covers 139 years not 115. Other countries' numbers are not as reliable but some are higher, almost none are the same or lower."

So what are the facts?

According to a January 2015 NASA article by Steve Cole of NASA Headquarters and Leslie McCarthy of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, "Since 1880, Earth's average surface temperature has warmed by about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit."

Obviously, a 135-year-long temperature change of 1.4 degrees over the entire planet rather than just this country is more than huge, not to mention 1880 was the approximate end of the Little Ice Age, making 1.4 degrees not only insignificant, but unsurprisingly normal.

Couple this with the universally acknowledged "pause" in warming over the past 18 consecutive years despite rising CO2 levels - the villain that supposedly raises global temperatures - and one can logically conclude that man's prosperity does not create global warming, his quest for power and control do.

Frank Gabl

Prospect Heights