In the June 10 issue of The Citizen, Marcia Hendershot takes issue with some of Dr. Walter Williams’ statements about climate change. I believe that some of her arguments are questionable.
First, in taking issue with Dr. Williams’ observation that science is never settled, she notes that there is a difference between scientific FACTS (which are, indeed settled) and theories. However, for thousands of years it was a scientific FACT that the sun revolved around the earth. There are numerous other examples of settled scientific FACTS that later were disproven.
Next, she notes that it is a FACT that climate changes. I agree with her, but I don’t think Dr. Williams or anyone else disagrees with this.
In fact, for “global warming/climate change/whatever they call it next year” skeptics, this is an important point. The Earth’s climate has always been changing and always will be.
That is why we are hesitant to accept the theory that this time it must be because of human carbon emissions. It might be so, but we are unwilling to accept extremely expensive, bureaucratic, freedom crushing “solutions” without good evidence that it is. Also, we want solid evidence that the negative effects are worse than the positive ones.
We don’t trust people who have tampered with data, whose climate models don’t work and who can’t explain why global warming paused for the last 18 years.
Let’s not forget that many of the people selling climate change today were freaking out about global cooling in the 1970s and wanted to impose draconian changes on everyone to avoid the “population bomb”.
Ms. Hendershot asks “What is CAUSING these rapid changes in climate?” The insertion of the one word “rapid” is critical to the argument that something different is going on now and therefore, it must be manmade.
Here we differ again — our climate has been changing, but the historical record indicates that there is nothing rapid or unusual about the past 50-100 years.
Finally, she was defending Obama’s claim that the science is settled. However, based on all his comments about this issue, he isn’t arguing that it’s settled that the climate is changing.
He is arguing that it’s settled that (1) the climate is changing, (2) we KNOW that it’s due to human carbon emissions, (3) the negatives will outweigh the positives, and (4) it’s more efficient to spend trillions on “green energy” and surrender a lot of our freedom to bureaucrats than to mitigate any negative effects.
On issues 2 through 4 he’s doing no better than “if you like your healthcare plan, you can keep your healthcare plan.”
Steve Metz
Peachtree City, Ga.
