SAN CLEMENTE, Paul Carlton: Many Americans have been influenced by the very expensive campaign by the oil, coal and natural gas companies, especially in the press, to deny that climate change is not due to greenhouse gas emissions. Thinking Americans should listen to
the 97 percent of climate scientists who have said for three decades that climate change is occurring due to greenhouse gas emissions. The Register has done a good job in reporting on climate change in its news pages; such as the recent articles on Gov. Jerry Brown's take on climate change and the solar plant opening in the Mojave Desert. But I agree with the recent letter to the editor by John Castillo [“Climate change deniers,” Feb. 14] in which he points out that the Opinion pages predominately reflect the opinion of climate deniers. Future civilization depends on world wide action to eliminate greenhouse gases; please change the Register's slant favoring the climate change deniers.
Crying ‘wolf' on climate
FULLERTON, Roger Burtner: Climate change and climate disruption are meaningless terms in regards to the processes that control climate. Those who use the terms typically assume that they describe events caused by carbon dioxide emitted by man's activities, rather than by natural processes. But there is nothing in the climate data to uniquely identify the cause of the change.
However, as a geologist who has studied the geologic record of climate, I am well aware that climate is constantly changing and often quite rapidly due to natural processes. Therefore, to infer that recent weather events are caused by CO2 and that man can act to control climate is wholly unconvincing.
Thousands of physical scientists have questioned the validity of human-induced global warming, including eminent physicists such as Freeman Dyson, Ivar Giaever (Nobel Prize), Robert Laughlin (Nobel Prize), Edward Teller, Fredrick Seitz, Robert Jastrow, William Nierenberg and Carver Mead.
Alarmists have claimed that humans are responsible for droughts, floods, heat waves, cold spells, blizzards, lack of snow, hurricanes, tornados, melting sea ice and just about any weather-related catastrophe. Alarmist predictions, however, have been notoriously bad.
For example, the British Met Office forecasted that this winter would be drier than normal in Great Britain and, for the past 13 of 14 years, forecasted warmer weather than what occurred.
As Melanie Phillips has observed, anthropogenic global warming is a magical theory that has been used to explain absolutely everything, including diametrically contradictory phenomena. As a result the predictions and claims of the alarmists are nearly meaningless.
Because their perspective is short term, and they are promoting an ideological agenda, they are unwilling to admit that climate is cyclical and that even greater extremes have occurred in the past due to natural processes. Most telling is that global average temperature is currently at or below the lower limit of all estimates of global temperature as predicted by numerous computer models.
Oblivious to the facts, President Obama plans to ask Congress for $1 billion to set up a climate resilience fund. Although resilience to severe weather is desirable, the U.S. government's record of spending such funds is abysmal, having already spent in excess of $165 billion since 1993 on climate change, including questionable energy alternatives such as ethanol, wind and solar, the latter two being unreliable, expensive sources of electricity.
ANAHEIM, William Clark: I find it very interesting that the only studies that support man-made global warming are funded directly or indirectly by the government. The actual facts, taking out the politics, are that the Earth has been cooling for the past 15 years. Another misguided so called “fact” is that it has not been scientifically and conclusively proven yet that CO2 is actually a greenhouse gas.
As to the new substitute for global warming – climate change – the Earth has been experiencing climate change for 2 billion years.
Politicians hate facts and history that don't coincide with their political agendas.