I don’t know from where Dr Ian Holford (NDL Letters, August 25) gets his “facts”, but it’s also a fact a 2013 review of 10,000 scientific abstracts found over 97 per cent support the theory that human activity is altering our climatic conditions.
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If I were driving a car and 97 per cent of police officers told me to ease off the gas, I’d follow their advice.
Of course, we know that climate has always changed, as any primary school science book can tell us.
But it requires a kind of “magic pudding” thinking to believe that the combined mass-industrial output of 7 billion people releasing tens of millions of years of stored carbon into the atmosphere in barely a century is having have no additional impact on our climate.
The people who claim this have some explaining to do.
Also required is an explanation of why plants are blooming earlier at higher altitudes and closer to the poles (ask any backyard gardener), and why animals are changing their migratory paths.
Perhaps those plants and animals don’t read the newspaper and so are unaware of Dr Holford’s “fact” that
climate hasn’t warmed.
And when I say “explain”, I don’t mean pithy letters to the editor.
I mean doing the serious work that thousands of scientists have done over decades — visiting glaciers, examining ice-cores, recording migration patterns and cataloguing plant distribution.
Those who wish to challenge the serious and patient work of real scientists have to do better than quoting the latest thing they read on the internet.
And those who wish to open new fossil fuel coal mines and gas plants over the cries of the climate “alarmists” had better first stop and ask a farmer what he/she thinks of the idea.
Mercurius Goldstein
New England Greens
candidate