Re: ‘Voice of youth resonates with organized walkout’ (Editorial, PQB News, May 30)
Climate change: Yes, let’s have dialogue!
Your editorial included a plea for dialogue, a challenge accepted in subsequent PQB News issues. One contributor pleads for us to listen to the IPCC.
The IPCC’s original 1987 mandate was for research into man-made influences on the climate, and fostered a breed of “climate scientists” with theories on AGW (temperature increases). But more than 20 years on, the IPCC accepted that, after 18 years of warming (1980 to 1998) this century has seen a “hiatus”. Global average satellite temperatures have been statistically flat in the last 20 years, or maybe a little up, and the IPCC admits their models are running hot.
Then they changed the channel to “climate change” and now on to a third channel, “climate emergency”. Extreme weather events are now touted as evidence of damaging climate change. Nope, no evidence there either. In 2013 the IPCC accepted long-studied expert opinion that there is no link between CO2 (AGW) theory and damage from extreme events, a position echoed by a 2018 U.S. study.
No serious person denies climate change from natural influences and (to some degree) anthropogenic CO2. There are many real examples of mankind’s harm to the environment - issues like plastics disposal, natural forest clear-cutting, CFC influence on the ozone hole and (at a local level) wood-burning fireplaces in Oceanside. There are others and we should be addressing them all.
On the other hand, what of the CO2-led greening of our planet, with higher and more drought-resistant crop yields and less fertilization? The IPCC’s models predicted the “greening”, so why no headlines?
Research on both sides of the debate is subject to “peer review” of course. So, Ballenas students, take what you learned in that “mandatory forum” (a disturbingly Orwellian concept) and read more widely. Paraphrasing Ralph Nader’s father on a school day: “did they teach you to believe, or did they teach you to think?”.
Len Flint
Qualicum Beach