Re: Warming industry cries wolf, again (B.C. Views, Gazette, May 4)
It takes a person with large eye blinkers to categorically deny the catastrophe at Fort McMurray is due to human-caused climate change, yet Tom Fletcher makes such bold statements.
While climate scientists agree that global temperature increases much beyond two degrees are likely to cause havoc to our planet’s climate, Fletcher tells us that the 1.5-degree increase in B.C. temperatures between 1900 to 2013 is just “one one-hundredth of a degree a year.” Yet had that increase begun in 1800, it would now be 3 C higher.
Even with the climate following the predictive models, outliers like Fletcher tell us climate change isn’t caused by us, instead blaming it on something benign-sounding like water vapour. What he failed to mention is that when human- caused greenhouse gases are released, there is a rise in the Earth’s surface temperature that allows for additional water vapour to be held in the atmosphere, doubling the temperature increase and creating a feedback loop (NASA, 2008).
I know people like Fletcher probably don’t understand science, but maybe he will understand this. The people of Calgary after the flood, or Slave Lake, and now Edmonton and Fort McMurray, will be coping with trauma and financial pain for years to come, as will most of us, to lesser extents. We’ll all have to pay tens of billions of dollars more via increases in taxes and insurance premiums just to rebuild what was destroyed – all due to that seemingly meaningless one one-hundredth of a degree a year. Maybe that might tweak something for him.
So, thanks Tom Fletcher and human-climate-change denier Tim Ball, where most of the column’s source material appears to have come from, but I think I’ll stick with actual experts.
Arthur Entlich
Metchosin