Letters: 'Climate change' not the issue

As a retired research scientist, the only quibble that I have with Stephen Moore’s excellent “Myth of ‘settled science’” [Opinion, March 15] is that he doesn’t take issue with the use of the term “climate change” by environmentalists as being synonymous with anthropogenic global warming. Climate change deniers are, in fact, a straw man and figment of their warped imaginations.

There are only those who deny catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is a valid hypothesis. No one denies that climate changes and very few deny that there has been warming. Climate change and warming are incontrovertible facts. The debate is not even whether man contributes to warming, but rather how much of the warming is due to CO2 emitted by man (about 4 percent of all CO2 emitted annually) and how much is due to natural processes.

Those of us who deny anthropogenic global warming is a valid hypothesis do so because we see evidence that natural processes that have controlled climate for millions of years continue to do so. Why, then, do alarmists demonize scientists who believe that man plays a smaller role by calling them climate deniers, a wholly inappropriate and inaccurate term? It is because climate alarmists have become a massive special-interest group that perceives those who don’t agree with them as a threat to their massive gravy train and power and thus need to be marginalized and destroyed at any cost.

Those who would do so are not really scientists, but rather ideologues.

Roger Burtner, Ph.D.

Fullerton

Climate change hurts

My heart goes out to Stephen Moore after reading “Myth of ‘settled science’” [Opinion, March 15]. Clearly, he feels beset on all sides. Alas, even National Geographic has attacked his opinion that climate change is a hoax. Yet he admits he is “in no position to know whether it is happening or not.” Still, he bemoans science studies that led to the green movement’s ending of the golden age of DDT, even though it poisoned women’s breast milk, food and animals.

He says scientific reports were “spectacularly wrong” on overpopulation, inadequate food, water, energy and pollution. I’d swear we see those very issues echoing every day in the reality of immigration, drought, the drive for transcontinental pipelines and the damage done by toxic spills.

Perhaps Moore could practice open-mindedness and look at the social and economic problems climate change is driving instead of belaboring hurt feelings when a magazine disagrees with him?

Suvan Geer

Santa Ana

Money corrupts science

Stephen Moore’s excellent “Myth of ‘settled science’” [Opinion, March 15] was very much to the point. However, he skims briefly past the major reason for the near-unanimity of support for human-caused global warming in the academic community: money, pure and simple. Every scientist will claim that they are open-minded and guided only by facts and the pure light of reason, but let us look at the real situation.

Many scientists in academia have a number of graduate students whom they must keep employed (i.e., paid for). In our increasingly socialistic society, practically the only source of financial support for research is our benevolent government. If you are a researcher in a climate-related field and the government has made it plain that it totally buys into the human-caused warming concept, are you going to propose research that might disprove the accepted answer?