Letter: Global warming is not debatable

On Earth Day David Barta wrote a rather misinformed column concerning climate change, asserting that "we as a world of people, have no idea what the hell we're doing…we shouldn't even be thinking about solutions until we're sure this is even a problem, because we don't know."

Mr. Barta would be more correct in declaring that he doesn't know; because the international community hosts many experts in bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) composed of members from the Worldwide Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental Programme who do know. All credible sources of scientific fact and opinion are in agreement: global warming is real and almost certainly caused by humans.

The overall agreement is 99.99 percent. There are a small handful of naysayers-I know of none who are considered climate experts. Mr. Barta asserts that he has looked into the research, yet asks very basic questions that could be answered if he checked any of the many legitimate sources of information such as the IPCC or NASA. He asks, "I know the stats, they say that there has been little more than a one degree Celsius rise in AVERAGE temperature over the past 100 years, but what does that mean?"

Taken out of context, one degree may seem like an insignificant change, but this rise in temperature has already had serious repercussions. For instance, in the past thirty years Greenland has lost ice mass equal to twice the size of Texas, and ice in the Arctic is disappearing as well.

As a result of this melt, two islands, Bedford and Lohachara, were completely submerged in 2006, displacing thousands of inhabitants. At the rate of one degree Celsius rise per century, NASA climate scientist James Hansen predicts that within the next century all of the ice in the Arctic will melt, raising ocean levels and effectively putting Washington D.C., New York City, and most of Florida under water. Mr. Barta moves on to ask, how global warming accounts for "the thousands of cities, and localities that have shown no change or even a decrease in local climate temperature over the last 50 years?"

This question shows a basic misunderstanding of the concept of global warming and climate change in general. Global warming refers to the increase in global temperatures caused by the increase of greenhouse gases in the earth's atmosphere, trapping the sun's heat and causing unstable weather patterns throughout the world. The effects of global warming are not, and cannot be expected to be, the same throughout the world.

Climatologists know this, meteorologists know this, and Mr. Barta's question is fatuous. In fact, there are not "thousands" of cities that have shown no change or a temperature decrease, although there may be a few. I'd also like to clear up the confusion in the latter half of Mr. Barta's article.

He names water vapor as the "LARGEST greenhouse gas in the atmosphere." While it is true that overall water vapor is the most significant greenhouse gas, it has naturally always been there. It is the extra carbon dioxide, methane and other human produced gas that causes the problem.

Furthermore, the warmer the temperature gets, the more water vapor stays in the atmosphere, thus leading to more warming. Water vapor only becomes threatening to Earth when human factors are introduced. Mr. Barta asks if we should try to replace fossil fuels with fuels that are "nicer to the environment?" and then answers his own question with "Maybe, but it's probably a good idea to figure out what those fuels are, or even if they are first, because we don't know." He must not have been paying attention to the news during the past decade.

There are plenty of renewable energy alternatives that are effectively employed throughout the world. Solar energy traps the sun's energy to create power, biomass converts plants into usable fuel for vehicles, geothermal draws steam from the heat within the earth, and turbines capture wind energy to generate electricity. In our part of the country we produce ethanol from corn, and in Iceland they use hydrogen to drive cars. There is no shortage of alternatives for fossil fuels. Fortunately for climate scientists, the earth's climate moves in observable patterns that allow them to draw legitimate conclusions about what will happen in the future, taking into account certain variables. The suggestion that we are acting too soon in terms of climate change is absurd because the consequences of inaction could be huge. The notion of global warming is by no stretch "new" and to imply that the global scientific community does not understand "what we are dealing with" only shows ignorance of the facts.