Sorry guys and gals...I'm too swamped and the heartland weather has been too nice to write long posts...so I'm recyling stuff I'm writing for other purposes. The post below is a letter to the editor I wrote Saturday: don't know if it will be published yet. It is in response to a letter by and engineer who claimed he knew what he was talking about, and he claimed certain nonsense as "facts", and then attacked the motivation of scientists (we'll say whatever to get funding). If I had solid science to say that global warming was not occuring from CO2, and had data and a model to support what else would cause the measured warming, I could probably make a better income than the crappy income I have now.

Editor, the Tribune,

This is a response to the “several facts” in the letter on global warming by Orin Murray, published on Saturday, May 19. The first “fact” is that temperature cycles are most influenced by sun spots and solar storms. The energy received from the sun may not be constant, and a lack of sunspots may have been associated with the Medieval “little ice age”. However, temperature has increased over the last half century with no influence from the 11 year cycle in solar activity. The second “fact” was “There is no clear evidence that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide cause measurable increases in the Earth’s temperature.” This is simply not true. The atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are known for the past precisely, and when CO2 is high, the earth is warm, and when there is an ice age, the CO2 levels are low. That high CO2 warms the earth is also simple physics. It is true that temperature increase in the last 100 years has been only 1 degree Fahrenheit. Sophisticated computer models that are used to study past climates also predict future climates. There is indeed a lot of uncertainty about how severe the future changes will be, with part of that uncertainty being the rate at which we will dump CO2 into the atmosphere. Climate change this century may only be catastrophic for part of earth’s population and part of its surface, but there were not over 6 billion people the last time earth’s climate changed.
Chris