Re-opening Little Ice Age discussion is neither interesting nor useful

Re: ‘Hunting down carbon dioxide is of benefit to no one: geologist,’ Letters, Beach Metro Community News, April 18.

I am, unfortunately, motivated to respond to the letter. Re-opening a debunked discussion of climate change by publishing a letter about the Little Ice Age (LIA) is neither interesting nor useful - and a promotion of misinformation.

Instead of the sleight of hand of asking the question “what are we to do if government is misinformed” as if it is a valid premise, I would posit “what are we to do if the public is constantly misinformed?”

To summarize this call for a rebuttal, the warming forces at play following the LIA are not the same forces causing global warming now. Also, heat on this planet is stored in water (liquid and frozen) as well as the air and rock. And this year the oceans are the hottest on record. Your letter writer has no comment on that.

Melting ice takes 80 calories to melt one gram, and only one calorie to heat one gram of water by one degree…so as ice melts the planet is warming even when the tempera- ture is still at zero degrees. (Cheng, L., Abraham, J., Trenberth, K.E. et al. Another Year of Record Heat for the Oceans. Adv. Atmos. Sci. (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00376-0232385-2)

It might have been much more interesting to do some actual reporting and find a scientific source to provide the public with good information.

IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) documents contain the official public agency recording of the latest available published science, and when the political re- ality is that they are the negotiated outcome of 195 governments – they often are reduced from the actual magnitude of the science to meet some political objective (i.e. don’t offend the fossil fuel wealth that the current cycle of the economy is fuelled by) it is hard to say they are overstating the critical nature of the greenhouse-gases-are-causing-globalheating issue.

You could cite experts, instead of providing a platform to those claiming that they are the only ones who know more than the experts:

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