Doubt business booming

A tobacco industry PR man coined the phrase “Our business is doubt.” He was talking about the use of industry scientists to make the link between tobacco, emphysema and cancer seem unreal.

Now, the coal and oil industries are funding studies that claim that global warming doesn’t exist. They seem to be succeeding. The Pew Research Center found that only 57 percent believe that Earth’s average temperature is rising. That’s down from 71 percent the year before.

Yet, in Wednesday’s Spokesman- Review we read that researchers at the University of Montana say “winter will be about a month shorter and summer a month longer.” They also found that snow will become rare in the lower areas and wildfires have, in the last 22 years, become six times greater than the previous 16 years.

We are facing radical climate change caused by the greenhouse effect. In 2004 a survey by Naomi Oreskes, a professor at UC San Diego, found that of 900 papers published between 1993 and 2003 not one disagreed with the human-caused global warming viewpoint.

Their business is doubt; our survival is rational belief.

Jeffrey E. Bourget

Coeur d’Alene