Climate concern no scam

Leon Carpenter (Letters, Sept. 12) refers to the link between climate change and CO2 emissions as the “Green Swindle.” Chalk up another victim of the unrelenting disinformation campaign by the lackeys of big oil and big coal.

Human activities are releasing more than 30 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. Atmospheric levels of CO2, a potent greenhouse gas, are now nearly 40 percent higher than they were in preindustrial times – higher, in fact, now than they have been in at least the last 800,000 years. We are now releasing CO2 from carbon stores that had slowly accumulated over millions of years, and we are doing so in an instant on geological time scales.

A recent poll shows that 97 percent of the thousands of scientists working actively in the climate sciences agree that human activity is responsible for the current relatively rapid increase in global temperatures – primarily through the production of CO2. Virtually every reputable scientific organization in the world concurs, and many climate scientists think measures must be taken now to avoid serious repercussions.

NASA reports January to August 2010 was globally the hottest such period on record. See skepticalscience.com for more information on this subject.

Jack DeBaun

Sandpoint