President Obama speaks at the United Nations Climate Summit on Sept. 23 in New York City. (Andrew Burton, Getty Images)
Re: “Climate change?s instructive past,” Jan. 11 George F. Will column.
George F. Will is intelligent and learned, but pathetically illogical. He suggests geologically recent natural climate fluctuations contradict climate scientists’ conclusion that global warming is human-caused. Will’s irrational implication is that because natural forces can cause climate changes, human actions cannot. That is equivalent to and logically as absurd as claiming that since volcanoes can naturally explode, human-made bombs cannot.
Natural factors, known and unknown, can and have caused climate changes vastly greater than anything now occurring. No one denies this. But it is irrelevant. The question is whether current global warming is caused by human activity, and overwhelmingly the evidence says it is.
If one ignores the greenhouse gases human activity has put into the atmosphere, then models using just natural factors say we should be entering a new ice age. Only when these gases are included in the models do they accurately describe current global warming.
D.R. Miklich,Denver
This letter was published in the Jan. 18 edition.You can spot members of the climate change resistance army, like George F. Will, with one simple observation: they never discuss it in terms of risk. Instead they go to extraordinary lengths to prove that climate change happens without human contribution. Unfortunately, that’s an observation that is universally accepted, so what’s the point? Perhaps Will should consider getting into the game by sharing his opinion on risk management, or explain how the global ban on atmospheric CFCs in the 1990s is any different from managing CO2 today. As a matter of conservative principle, he won’t “curtail liberty” by practicing risk management, at least not until it bites him. But thanks for the history lesson.
Steve Eddy,Arvada
This letter was published in the Jan. 18 edition.
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