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Arguments over climate get overblown

Re: Credentials crucial in gauging authority, Argument exhibits irrelevancies and Coalition principles causes skepticism, Letters, April 21.

To the Editor,

Re: Credentials crucial in gauging authority, Argument exhibits irrelevancies and Coalition principles causes skepticism, Letters, April 21.

Tom Harris was right on when he wrote that “Emotions run high as the climate debate has become intensely polarized”. Now the global warming doomsayers have returned another volley in an ongoing bun-fight.

One writer discredits Harris as a “mechanical engineer, not a climate scientist”. Can we also ignore David Suzuki since he’s a geneticist, not a climatologist? Or did his study of fruit flies make him a “climate expert”? How about the inconvenient Al Gore? Does his CV include climatology? I suspect it includes “wealthology”, given his price for scare-mongering speaking tours.

In a country of religious freedom, is it fair to smear the “religious right”? We don’t have to agree with them, but it’s rather hubristic to categorize them with “scientific illiterates”. But, that’s common thinking among leftists. If you don’t agree with them, you must be an illiterate who “should be ashamed of your ignorance and bias” and/or “just a nutbar standing in the way of action”. No indication of what that action might be.

I wonder if anyone who would “trust the credentials of those on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” knows what those credentials are. The IPCC is a lobby group more interested in redistributing wealth than honest research into the causes and effects of global warming. Their reports merit the same disregard that UN resolutions get.

Eco-zealots make regular use of terms like “experts” and “world’s leading climate scientists” etc., but fail to attach names or credentials to them. That, plus a lot of hysterical overblown rhetoric, tends to eliminate credibility.

In the natural sciences, if you can’t measure it, you can’t prove it. So before getting into economic insanity, how much warming, if any, is anthropogenic and how much is natural?

Jim Corder

Nanaimo