[Forum] Fellow Woy Woy resident, Charles Hemmings’ letter re the ‘two climate camps’ in Coast Community News edition 232 is an unfortunate example of the distortions generously sponsored by fossil fuel moguls and pursued and promulgated by those who do not believe in the reality of the existential threat that the warming climate poses.
Yes, there are two ‘sides’ to the issue, those who know action must be immediate and the decreasing number of non-believers whose stance threatens our very survival by refusing to accept facts long known to science.
The use of the terms ‘deniers’ and ‘alarmists’ along with loaded quotes like “defies statistical reasoning, dubious computer models, miniscule change, miniscule increase and opinion without factual backup” and so on, negate his argument and show its bias.
He asks for evidence but denies its existence and (almost) universal acceptance in real science and, while acknowledging that the atmospheric CO2 level has doubled in recent times (as recorded accurately for many years at centres across the world), he cannot then accept that the amount of energy this gas now absorbs must also be doubled,-thus heating the atmosphere more.
Neither does his equating ‘alarmists’ with religious zealots, nor his misrepresenting Europe’s long history of fossil fuel use, support his argument.
Mr Hemmings fails to recognise so many evidentiary facts including prolonged severe droughts, ferocity of weather events, bushfire frequency and severity, oceanic temperature change and acidification, changes to oceanic currents, melting of Polar Regions, disappearance of glaciers, melting of permafrost releasing dangerous amounts of methane, etc, etc.
Scientific predictions made long ago based on fact are being shown to be true.
There is no more debate.
Realists want to survive and fix the problems while the fading few doubters will not or cannot believe this stark reality.
Email, Mar 17
Geoff Stralow, Woy Woy