Dear Editor,
I am replying to a letter from Dave Scott attempting to refute Carl Wolfe’s assertion that climate warming in the recent past is due to increased amounts of C02 due to human activity. I grew up on the Project and am a retired meteorologist. Mr. Scott makes some false statements and conclusions to bolster his argument. The first is that the earth was warmer for most of the past 10,000 years than it is now. According to the NOAA site, climate.gov the earth is currently, .75 degrees C above the average for the past 11,400 years with the bulk of the warming quite recent. https://bit.ly/1uMryIP.
Mr. Scott also claims that CO2 levels were much higher in the more distant past than they are today. This is true. He claims 1200 ppm as opposed to 410 ppm now. Actually they went as high as 4000 ppm and the climate was much warmer than it is now. This was in spite of the sun being cooler than it is now. The sun has been gradually increasing the amount to energy it produces since it was born 4.5 billion years ago. The increased amount of CO2 in the past was how the dinosaurs lived in a warmer climate even though the sun produced less energy than it does now. This would seem to strengthen the role of CO2 and other greenhouse gases rather than the reverse as Scott implies.
Scott further asserts that lower sun spot spot activity will cool the earth if this trend continues. It will to a minor extent (a few tenths of a degrees) while increasing greenhouse gases will counter with several degrees of warming – a ten fold difference.
The NASA article he cites was not directly from NASA but was reported by a web site. They first reported that the surface temperature would decrease when NASA had actually claimed that the far upper atmosphere would cool. The site issued a correction the following month.
The major problem here is that many conservatives considered global warming to be a political question when it is rather a scientific one. Science has shown us that global warming due to human activities is real and increasing. The political question is what we as humans do about it and you could argue any approach from the Green New Deal of the left to nothing on the right.
YCN Subscriber
David Trask
Crestwood, MO
