Re: Re: 'The climes they are a-changin'' [Village News, Lewis Letter, 4/18/24]

Only in America is Global Warming a political issue. That’s because only America has a political party that politicizes everything, with emphasis on anything that clashes with their anti-science and technology stance. And that is despite the fact that America rose to be a global power house largely because of its full embrace of science and technology.

Former President Trump denounced Global Warming as a “Chinese hoax.” It’s obvious Mr. Lewis buys into that misinformation and is ignorant of the scientific method and the role physics has played in climate science.

Mr. Lewis questions the annual global temperature increase of 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, and by that, also the source of the increase. But “Virtually all climate scientists agree that this increase in heat-trapping gases is the main reason for the 1.8F (1.0C) rise in global average temperature since the late nineteenth century.”

Climate scientists can directly correlate the amount of heat trapping gases being generated annually, primarily carbon dioxide (CO2), with the global increase in temperature. For source, search on: “Are humans causing or contributing to global warming” (Climate.Gov)

Mr. Lewis is also dismissive of alternate means of measuring temperature, like isotopic analysis of ice cores. But physicists excel in finding and validating indirect means of measuring things. Here are a couple of examples.

In 1967, they made an atomic clock the standard for measuring time. It’s based on the frequency of vibration of a cesium atom and is accurate within one second in 1,400,000 years. Also, they have measured the temperature of the sun’s surface: about 10,000 Fahrenheit (5,600 Celsius). They certainly did not use a mercury thermometer for that.

Mr. Lewis also tried to use the fallacy of false equivalence. Yes, on the one hand, there are dozens of scientists who doubt there’s global warming: but on the other hand there is the global consensus: 175 nations of one accord regarding the Paris Climate Accords (4/11/2015) whose “central aim is to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius [3.6 degrees F] above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius [2.7 degrees F].”

There’s only one known thing that will do that: a major global decrease in the use of fossil fuels.

John H. Terrell