Dear Editor:
On the subject of global warming, most of the letters that I read in your paper are from people who are genuinely and passionately concerned about the future of our globe. I find in these letters a recurring oversight that I would like to address.
Almost all of them cite weather records that go all the way back to 1880 showing beyond all doubt that our climate is warming. I’ll grant them that point. One hundred and thirty-six years of data is hard to argue with. But the thing that is being overlooked is the time frame. Look up paleoclimatology on any reputable search engine and spend just a little time becoming familiar with climate changes before recorded history and it will put that 136 years into perspective.
One of the first datasets I found had a temperature graph spanning 542 million years. Can you visualize how much space the last 136 years takes up on that graph? No more than a pixel. The overall trends of the graphs are universally cyclical. The lines are jagged, representing abrupt changes as the norm, not the exception.
If you research prehistoric carbon dioxide levels you will find the same kind of gyrating numbers with no clear correlation to global temperature.
To acknowledge that our climate is changing is a fine thing. To presume that such change is something new is quite wrong. In fact, to find a period of climate stability is a very rare thing.
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