Carbon dioxide letter prompts many responses

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

The letter writer expresses the opinion that climate modelers have not taken sufficient account of the effects of volcanic eruptions on global warming. He concludes that “The consensus attribute that warming to carbon dioxide which cannot be teased out of the temperature data and is not science except as a tentative assumption”.

In support of his position, he used “graphs of temperature sequences through time created by the National Oceanograhic and Atmospheric Administration better known as NOAA”.

The NOAA, however, appears to interpret its data very differently. The NOAA website, citing scientific studies, states that “Human activities emit 60 or more times the amount of carbon dioxide released by volcanoes each year. Large, violent eruptions may match the rate of human emissions for the few hours that they last, but they are too rare and fleeting to rival humanity’s annual emissions.” (https://www.climate. gov/news-features/climate-qa/which-emits-more-carbon-dioxide-volcanoes-or-human-activities/)

The NOAA’s views are supported by other trusted scientific sources. For example, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration states on its website that “Essentially, CO2 emissions from human activities dwarf those of volcanoes”. (https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/42/what-do-volcanoes-have-todo-with-climate-change/)

We must recognize that global warming is a serious threat to humanity and is caused by the rapid increase, since preindustrial times, of GHG emissions from human activities. For the sake of our children and grandchildren, we must take all steps possible to reduce GHG emissions.

Jeffrey Levitt

A waste of ink and paper

Wow! For decades now, thousands of global scientists from multiple disciplines have built an increasingly strong consensus backed by increasingly robust evidence that human activity leading to increased carbon dioxide (and other) emissions is causing the climate to warm (“Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability,” IPCC Sixth Assessment Report).

But wait! Beach Metro Community News publishes the lengthy opinion of a single artesian geologist who claims, that we should ignore CO2 and focus on beach clean-ups!

Just an opinion in a letter to the editor, you say? Sure! I look forward to an equally weighted piece on the evidence that the earth is flat. What a waste of ink and paper (another source of climate change, by the way)!

Mark

Time is short to deal with climate change

Timm

Your letter writer is a geologist, not a climate scientist. The Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change is made up of hundreds of climate scientists. In their scientific reports they have raised increasing concern about the impact of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.

Their latest 8,000 page report published last month details the devastating consequences of these emissions and the Increasingly dangerous and irreversible risks if we do not change course. This is the most comprehensive, best available scientific assessment of climate change. It’s real. It’s serious. It’s us. We can fix it but time is short.

Doug Pritchard Impacts of volcanic activity called negligible

The letter writer claims that climate modellers have been mistaken by “global time series seriously affected by volcanic activity from 1875 to 1932.”

Seriously? The claim is contradicted by the following statent: In the industrial era, volcanic activity had had negligible impacts on global temperature trends. (USGCRP (2017). Wuebbles, D. J.; Fahey, D. W.; Hibbard, K. A.; Dokken, D. J.; et al. (eds.). Climate Science Special Report: Fourth National Climate Assessment, Volume I. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Global Change Research Program..Link at https://science2017.globalchange.gov/ See Chapter 2: Physical Drivers of Climate Change.)

Boyd Reimer

Science should be free from doctrinaire nonsense

Climate change is real; no debate about that. Ice Age anyone?

But what role do industrialized humans play? It has become a polarized and emotive issue. And political. So much populist pseudo-science out there; so it’s refreshing to read the letter-writer’s informative opinion on this complex topic. Right or wrong, the field should remain open to informed discussion free from doctrinaire nonsense. That’s called science.

Brendan Murphy