Spokane7
49°
September 9, 2009 in Letters
Compare the risks
The letters-to-the-editor debate on climate change has been long running and contentious. The prospect of one side convincing the other seems slim. Maybe we can agree on a course of action while disagreeing.
Would each side admit that there is a least a small chance that they could be wrong?
I believe there is a powerful amount of research showing that climate change is indeed man-made (all of the most credible national science organizations are unified and alarmed). Nevertheless I am willing to say that I might be wrong. Are those on the other side of the debate willing to admit that there could be a 5 percent chance that they are wrong?
If I am wrong, the worst case would be that we might cause severe damage to the U.S. economy by supporting political measures that needlessly constrain industry and raise costs to us all. If the deniers are wrong and we do nothing, we get severe storms, draughts, fires, flooded coasts, altered ocean currents, species extinctions, mass starvations and perhaps even the collapse of civilization.
The least risky course is to support immediate vigorous political action to stop man’s possible contribution to climate change.
Scott Melville
Spokane
Choose acts of kindness 
Marksman on September 10 at 8:24 a.m.
Scott,
Better google up precession or Milankovitch before you accept that carbon tax or more. Global warmings likely cause has been known for a long time by geologists who can almost assure us that it is hardly man caused. A million plus years of atmospheric records are trapped in the ice caps. They have been analyzed and a correlation between the tilt of the Earth on its axis, and Ice ages and warming epochs on Planet Earth exists.
The earth wobbles as it spins and its tilt toward or away from the Sun determine how much sunlight falls on the surface and heats the atmosphere. More sunlight, higher temperatures, less sunlight, cooler temperature.
Volcanoes and the Mid ocean ridge put out more CO2 in a day than all the burning of fuels humanity burns in a year. What none of the CO2 naysayers mention is Earth has a large complex system called the carbon cycle that traps megatons of carbon dioxide every day.
Where does the carbon go? Trees consume it, plants consume it, shellfish use it; the ocean breaks CO2 down into its components, carbon and oxygen. The oxygen is liberated as a gas, the carbon sinks to the bottom as calcium carbonate and forms huge beds of limestone. Drive out to Mullan Idaho and look east, you can see the upper edge of the Jefferson Limestone poking up as the Rocky Mountains. The Jefferson limestone is over a mile thick in places. Millions of years ago that limestone was CO2 in the ocean.
The human ego knows no bounds.