global cooling letter based on climate hoax

Editor:

Holmes’ letter follows the standard form that has been circulating on the Internet for some time.

These hoaxes are being promulgated through several websites funded by ExxonMobil and other multi-national corporations that stand to benefit from creating doubt regarding the causes of global climate change.

Investigative reporters at Mother Jones magazine have obtained the records of these sites and listed them on its website at at www.motherjones.com.

Also listed is the amount of funding each gets from ExxonMobil.

The report, called Put a Tiger in Your Think Tank, should be required reading for those interested in sorting through the information on climate change.

In addition, the Union of Concerned Scientists has also detailed — in a report called Smoke, Mirrors and Hot Air: How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco’s Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Science — how ExxonMobil has tried to influence the debate on climate change.

Their report can be found at www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/ExxonMobil-GlobalWarming-tobacc0.html.

As an example, Steven Milloy, who runs www.junkscience.com out of his home with $90,000 of ExxonMobil funding, was a key player in the effort of the tobacco companies to create doubt regarding the link between cancer and cigarettes in the 1980’s.

Milloy has “at least five” connections to ExxonMobil, according to the Mother Jones report.

He is a columnist for www.FoxNews.com and runs JunkScience.com, CSRWatch.com, the Advancement of Sound Science Center and the Free Enterprise Action Institute, all funded by ExxonMobil.

By contrast, on Feb. 2, the long-awaited report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, located in Switzerland and funded by the United Nations and the World Meteorological Association since 1988, will be released.

This report from working group No. 1 of the panel will include the contributions of more than 2,500 scientific reviewers, more than 800 contributing authors and more than 450 lead authors from in excess of 130 countries.

The report incorporates six years of work in four volumes.

To see the work of the panel so far, go to www.ipcc.ch.

Stay tuned for the report, which should finally put to rest such silly assertions as “cosmic rays” and “sun spots” as causes of global climate change.

Holmes’ letter states that “paleoclimatologists generally deny that global warming observed over the past century is due to human CO2 emissions resulting from the burning of fossil fuels.”

This is not true.

What paleoclimatologists do acknowledge, however, is that CO2 is the worst offender, followed by other, potentially even more dangerous, greenhouse gasses, such as methane being released from northern peat bogs that are being unduly warmed by unprecedented changes in global climate.

The IPCC report in February will summarize the latest and best information we have on the true causes of climate change.

This is the most important issue of our time and we must begin to pay a lot more attention to what we can do leave a living planet for our children.

Penny Powers

Kamloops

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