TOM HARRIS: Climate change scare is ridiculous

I agree with T. Gamble (“Swimming Against the tide of climate change,” May 14). The climate scare has become ridiculous.

Take the claim by alarmists that 2014 was the warmest year on record. Ignoring that the duration of the record in question is only about 150 years or three ten-millionths the age of the Earth, the supposed temperature record was set by two one-hundredths of a degree Celsius. But the uncertainty in the measurement is, according to NASA, one tenth of a degree, or five times the amount by which the record was supposedly set. Nine years statistically tie with 2014. No new record was set.

Because it has warmed only 0.8 degrees in the past century and sea level rise has not been unusual, climate campaigners like Rabbi Judy Weiss, co-leader of the Boston chapter of the Citizens’ Climate Lobby (the group she promotes in her letter), resort to scary computerized models of the future to frighten the populous.

But what Weiss and CCL do not seem to understand is that the science of climate change is far too immature to even know what equations to program into the computer since we still lack a theory of climate. All we have are bits and pieces of a theory and some observational data with which we try to string it all together.

University of Western Ontario professor Chris Essex, an expert in the mathematical models that are the basis of today’s climate concerns, explains, “Climate is one of the most challenging open problems in modern science. Some knowledgeable scientists believe that the climate problem can never be solved.”

Because of the overconfidence of groups like CCL that we know what weather and sea level will be like decades in advance and we control climate as if we had a global thermostat, governments across the world pour $1 billion a day into climate finance. This diverts urgently needed funds away from environmental issues that we know we can solve, problems such as air, land and water pollution, not to mention society’s other real world concerns.

When the climate scare finally collapses, as is already happening due to the current, unforecast 18 year pause in global warming, the environmental movement will suffer a serious blow to its credibility. Its time environmentalists kicked climate campaigners off the stage.

TOM HARRIS

Ottawa, Ontario

EDITOR’S NOTE: Tom Harris is executive director of International Climate Science Coalition in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.