In a well written letter to editor (Record-Bee, April 6), D. M. Farris affirms many of the same fallacies used by global warming denial opinion pieces like William Rusher”s, but then adds a few of his own.
Both Rusher and Farris suggest that environmental effects like ozone depletion and acid rain were somehow hysterical fantasies because they are no longer in the mainstream press, and that they have somehow magically gone away.
When scientists presented the evidence of the environmental, economic, and human effects of these phenomena, governments around the world responded with emissions standards for sulfur dioxide (acid rain) and aggressive banning of CFCs (ozone).
The effects of these policies has been successful at retarding both effects. The continuing regulation of emissions and CFCs is having a positive effect, this is conveniently ignored.
Farris also makes an unfortunate mistake of calling Al Gore a scientist. Gore”s never represented himself as such; he is still a politician. There are more issues to tackle, but I”ll stick to one more.
In politically volatile controversies involving scientific claims, it is extremely difficult for non-scientists as ourselves to evaluate claims. One expert claims one thing, another the opposite. How to judge?
The answer is not according to the credentials of the competing authorities, but to look at what the science itself actually says. Most of us can read magazines like Science, Nature, New Scientist, and Scientific American.
These all have articles written at a summary level for us lay people, or for people who”s expertise lies elsewhere. In the same issue they will include then, the detailed peer-reviewed article including citations and references.
This presents a problem for Farris and Rusher, who suggest that climate science is either biased toward global warming by federal funding, or somehow fraudulent for the same reason. This wingnut conspiracy was claimed in a popular novel by Chrichton, and has been parrotted ever since by people who either ignorant of how science works or are deliberately lying. The science that makes up the global warming claim as reviewed by the IPCC is contained in dozens of different disciplines, climate science, oceanograpy, chemistry, organic chemistry, meterology, geology, geo-physics, with hundreds and hundreds of different journals reviewed by thousands of scientists across each of these disciplines and from dozens of different nations and funding sources.
This is silly. Science gets things wrong, but it is science that corrects it. Indeed, science is built not upon confirming theories, but in falsifying them, trying to prove them wrong. You don”t get a Nobel Prize or get a professorship at a major research institution by confirming the scientific norm, you do it by creating new science, and prove a popular theory to be mistaken.
If Mr. Farris is a meterologist as he claims, all it takes is a researched article or two in a peer reviewed meterological journal that shows without a doubt that the science is wrong on global warming. I would love to see him win the Nobel, and this would be good news.
Mike Sullivan
Kelseyville
