To the editor:
Re: “Letter: Olson backward on science cartoon,” Jan. 17.
One disturbing trend among those who deny man-made climate change is that they would have us believe they are more knowledgeable than the thousands of climate scientists who make a career out of researching the issue and that those scientists are incapable of recording global temperatures or accounting for the complex variables.
That, or there is an impenetrable conspiracy among scientists from dozens of different countries, ethnic origins, cultures, languages and religious and political beliefs to falsely manufacture the 97 per cent agreement that greenhouse gasses are the primary driver of current global warming.
Letter writer Bob Hoye has to make a further incredulous assertion in comparing Galileo to climate-change deniers as if scepticism itself is a noble outcome. The Vatican was not a scientific organization. The Church of Christianity was a primary socio-political force and Galileo merely confirmed for them what Copernicus had deduced a hundred years prior. The Church didn’t appreciate the threat to their power.
Today the primary socio-political force is obviously not climate science, as Hoye asserts, but the fossil fuel sect of the church of capitalism which, for the same reasons, resists the scientific conclusions with the same religious tenacity. Some skepticism is healthy. But faced with such a frightening problem as climate change, ignoring the best scientific evidence is madness.
Note that Hoye claims two examples of an authoritarian government which has condemned “government” science, but then only provides one.
It is nonsensical to call climate science an “authoritarian government science” especially under the political conditions we see in Canada (and most of the world) today. Quite the opposite.
It is also laughable that Hoye accuses supporters of the conclusions of climate science as being in it for the money considering the trillions of dollars of fossil fuel profits at stake.
Furthermore, there is no scientific assumption that “only CO2 influences climate.” Therefore his examples disproving the connection are meaningless. Climate scientists are well aware of the hundreds of variables and the irregular patterns of warming.
Ron van der Eerden,
Vancouver
