Your Opinion: Oil companies accept climate change data

Dear Editor:

Recently, an opinion in this paper was published disputing climate change which quoted a single well known skeptic known for misrepresenting statements in others publications. Additionally, the opinion also listed only celebrities trying to raise the alarm regarding the problem.

While I don't agree one needs an advanced degree for an educated opinion, here's a list of just some of the organizations with publications regarding climate change and have accepted man-made climate change as a real threat and find it scientifically supported.

The United States Pentagon; NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS); National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA): http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalwarming.html; National Academy of Sciences (NAS): http://books.nap.edu/collections/global_warming/index.html; State of the Canadian Cryosphere; Environmental Protection Agency; The Royal Society of the UK (RS) -http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/page.asp?id=3135; American Geophysical Union (AGU); American Meteorological Society (AMS):http://www.ametsoc.org/policy/climatechangeresearch_2003.html;American Institute of Physics (AIP):http://www.aip.org/gov/policy12.html; National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR): http://eo.ucar.edu/basics/cc_1.html; American Meteorological Society (AMS); Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society; Chinese Academy of Sciences; Academie des Sciences (France); Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina (Germany); Indian National Science Academy; Accademia dei Lincei (Italy) Science Council of Japan; Russian Academy of Sciences.

But if scientists are too liberal and politicians too unreliable, perhaps you find the opinion of key industry representatives more convincing: BP, the largest oil company in the UK and one of the largest in the world, has said: There is an increasing consensus that climate change is linked to the consumption of carbon based fuels and that action is required now to avoid further increases in carbon emissions as the global demand for energy increases.

Shell Oil (yes, as in oil, the fossil fuel) said: Shell shares the widespread concern that the emission of greenhouse gases from human activities is leading to changes in the globalclimate.

Eighteen CEOs of Canada's largest corporations had this to say in an open letter to the Prime Minister of Canada: Our organizations accept that a strong response is required due to the strengthening evidence in the scientific assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

We accept the IPCC consensus that climate change raises the risk of severe consequences for human health and security and the environment. We note that Canada is particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.