I refer to an article titled "Climate change superstitions put human well-being at risk, (the Post, March 3) written by Christopher Lingle.
I would ask that when you speak of numbers use the pictorial method to show the numbers. Numbers without context are really of little value. If you plot the temperatures since the last ice age, it would appear that the earth is warming.
It would show slight dips over short periods of time, but for the most part it is painfully obvious the earth is warming without any help from man.
So the real problem here is that a warming earth will radically alter the stability of the climate.
But the good news used to be that a rapid change occurred over thousands of years giving biology time to adapt. However, on five specific occasions the flux in climate was so rapid naturally that a large percentage of creatures perished.
These events were known as mass extinctions. Knowing that these unusual events occurred naturally is probably the only warning an intelligent species would need to stay very aware of how it impacts its environment.
Since humans have learned to identify specific elements and life forms in sediment and ice core samples, they have decided that in some of these past rapid climate change events, there were concentrations of CO2 and methane different from today.
That is just a clue, a hint that concentrations of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere have changed. A smart species would then try and understand these various elements and their impacts to better their chances of survival.
When the clalthrates on the bed of the oceans were discovered recently, the Methane Birthday Cake, so to speak, scientists began to hypothesize that these frozen structures could erupt with a slight increase in ocean temperature.
Once the clalthrates begin venting as a gas, then the rise of methane will be a planetary catastrophic event. The great Permian extinction is not hard fact, even recently new geology has found difficult realities that make understanding what happened millions of years ago more difficult.
What physics tells us is that CO2 warms the air, black carbon warms the air, and methane warms the air.
Additionally, cracks in a new dry lake bed release moisture during the night because the warm daylight air gets trapped down in the cracks causing normal subsurface moisture to pour upward all night long.
Water vapor is a fantastic greenhouse gas, the more moisture in the air, the warmer it will get.
Earl E.
washington
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