A recent letter writer makes his case against the seriousness of the many threats of man-made climate change by providing extensive excerpts from a short blog, “Environmentalists Are Dead Wrong.” The author of that blog is Dr. Walter Williams, a proud libertarian economist with a Ph. D. in, yes, Economics, not in climate science.

Dr. Williams has never done any research in climate sciences; therefore he might be expected to have based his analysis on experts in the field. Yet all but one of his citations is to someone outside the field of climate studies. Dr. Williams published his article in LewRockwell.com, which identifies itself as an anti-state, anti-war, pro-market blog founded by two self-proclaimed anarcho-capitalists, Lew Rockwell and Burt Blumert.

As Earth Day approached this year, the article was dutifully picked up by every fossil fuel-funded, man-made change denial site, network and megaphone you can shake a stick at.

The writer’s argument was based on cherry-picked, isolated, exaggerated predictions of a half-dozen scientists in fields almost exclusively unrelated to climate change. With one exception, citations from these sources are from popular magazines (one cited source is Mademoiselle).

They include Dr. George Wald, a biologist specializing in retinal pigmentation; Paul Erlich, a biologist expert on overpopulation; Kenneth Watt, an ecologist with a PhD. D. in Zoology; Gaylord Nelson, a Senator published in Look Magazine who quotes Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, who is an ornithologist; Harrison Brown, a nuclear scientist and geo-chemist predicting the disappearance of copper, lead, zinc, tin, gold and silver (this is called “throwing in the kitchen sink for good measure”); Nigel Calder, himself a critic of climate science and man-made global warming who predicts an impending ice age; David Viner, a climate scientist, (score one for you) whose predictions about the end of snow in Britain have proved to be ridiculous and ill-founded; plus totally irrelevant predictions made in the 1930’s and ’40’s by federal agencies that oil and gas supplies would peak.

Certainly, there must be better arguments against the preponderant conclusions of decades of climatological research affirming and confirming that: 1) “global climate change caused by human activities is occurring now 2) it is a growing threat to society,” 3) greenhouse gases from fossil fuels are isotopically identifiable and they, not any of the other factors that affect the earth’s climate, have had the greatest sustained positive forcing in increasing the average global temperature about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1880’s.” (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center.).

With equal certitude, you’re not going to hear reasonable counter-arguments from deniers. They are interested only in conclusions that support their absolutely cocksure, pre-conceived, ideological anti-government beliefs regardless of the source. Their arguments should not be dignified with the label of pseudo-science; they are certifiable rank idiocy.

Mademoiselle Magazine died in 1991. Maybe we should look to future Glamour or Cosmopolitan features originally written in crayon for authoritative studies on the matter. Alas, deniers never die. They don’t even fade away.

Tim Mannello

Williamsport

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