Article Tags: Martin Hertzberg, Reply To Article
To all:
I just couldn’t let this article in the latest New Yorker article Up in the Air by Elizabeth Kolbert go by without comment.
Marty
Dear Editor:
Kindly forward this e-mail to Elizabeth Kolbert. Obviously, the attachments to this e-mail are to voluminous for a letter to the Editor, but I sincerely hope that she will read and learn from them.
Here is my letter:
Elizabeth Kolbert, in her “Up In the Air” comment of April 12, 2010, has made an heroic effort to revive the dying theory that human emission of CO2 is causing global warming/climate change. But those of us who know it well and its “living will” to decline heroic measures, feel that the wisest course of action is to let it pass peacefully in the hospice of dying theories.
There is a simple way to tell the difference between scientists and propagandists. If scientists have a theory they carefully search for data that might actually contradict their theory so they can test it further or refine it. The propagandists, on the other hand, select only the data that might agree with their theory and dutifully ignore any data that disagrees with it. How else to explain Ms. Kolbert’s argument that “despite what it might have felt like in the Northeast these past few months, globally it was one of the warmest winters on record”? Actually, the global data summarized in www.climate4you.com show significant world-wide cooling for the past decade. The data also show nothing beyond the normal range of variability in either the polar ice area coverage or in the rate of rise of sea level for the last 20 years.