Editor Frederick, Regarding Steele's Scary Campfire Stories. March 6, 2019

Letter to Editor Frederick, 

Regarding Jim Steele’s "What’s Natural?" Scary Campfire Stories.

March 6, 2019 - Pacifica Tribune - sent March 11, 2019

Dear Editor Fredrick,

What’s Natural? Indeed, that is the question.  It took a couple days to steel myself to tackle the Scary Campfire Stories column but I’ve been working on it much of the day and hopefully it’ll be posted soon.  I’m pretty sure my point by point review wouldn’t be of much interest around here, so I’m posting it at my ConfrontingScienceContrarians.blogspot.com - I’d much appreciate it if you could share that with your readers. Instead of details I’d like to share general impressions. 

Lets start with a summary of the column’s ten paragraphs: introduces topic with the Heaven’s Gate Suicide Cult (no crass politicization happening here); dismisses the seriousness of a 1°Centigrade rise within our global climate engine; misrepresents the facts in order to disparage a respected butterfly expert; quibbles about Polar Bear counts, while ignoring that the Arctic Ice Cap is melting away; ridicules penguin researchers for revolutionizing census gathering abilities and keeping up to date with their available data; heaps scorn on the entire climate science community because some scientist at some low point once said snow was going to disappear from England in the next decades; oh and we're to forget about “atmospheric insulation” because CO₂ is plant food; he tells us there’s far more important problems to address than our planet’s atmospheric insulation regulator going from 280 ppm when the steam engine was invented to over 410 ppm and rising fast today.

Then Steele’s coup de grâce: ”For several decades, bogus catastrophic climate-change claims have come and gone.” -“If we truly care about nature … the real problem is overhunting, invasive species and loss of habitat.”

So this is libertarian entertainment?  Is that it?  It sure isn’t serious education!  What’s natural about this contemptuous disregard for our physical Earth and it’s biosphere?  How on Earth can one hold the notion that raising the temperature of our global biosphere won’t profoundly alter its components?  

Why this embrace of belligerent willful ignorance towards how our vastly interconnected biosphere and global heat and moisture distribution engine operates?

Our planet gets broiled 24/7 along the equator.  That heat is transported towards the poles through moisture distribution and winds and storms.  This engine has been humming along at a pretty steady rate for quite a while.  

Then we increased our atmospheric insulation (greenhouse gases) and continue doing so - it’s physics - you are going to keep increasing the amount of heat being circulated, think water coming to a simmer on a stove top.  We’re also increasing the amount of water our atmosphere holds, this has increased the hydrological cycle producing more heavy downpour events, and so on and so forth.

But it’s like none of that ever elevates above a joke amongst the GOP libertarian crowd.  So sad, so self destructive.  Willful ignorance is going to help no one when what we need is all hands on deck.

Sincerely,

Peter Miesler

aka citizenschallenge