Friday, August 25, 2006

Harper piles on. News Sentinel prints one side.

Lex has made quite a splash in his new Ft. Wayne, IN home. B J Harper wrote a letter to the editor supporting Al Gore’s pathetic attempt at filmmaking. Lex wrote a rebuttal pointing out what seemed to be obvious errors in MS. Harper’s logic. Then MIT grad David Gunter chimed in with a nasty letter attacking Lex, but not refuting much of anything in my letter. Now, in an attempt to get the last word in, Ms. Harper has returned with one more shout, but alas it misses the mark as well. Below is a fisking of that piece.

Check Scientific American, too

Doug Schumick, who wrote a guest column rebutting my guest column about global warming, should purchase a copy of the special issue of Scientific American for September that is on newsstands now. The whole magazine supports the science of global warming – and this is peer-reviewed material – that you so haughtily dismissed in response to my article on the topic that appeared a couple of weeks ago in this paper.

Schumick: First, I’ll make Haprer the same deal I made Gunter, if she can put her finger on one line in my letter where I contend that the Earth is not in a warming cycle, I’ll buy her a steak dinner. I never contended any such thing. The Earth has warmed between one-half and one degree over the last century. A number of climate experts have noted that the Earth experienced both a widely recognized Medieval Warm Period from about A.D. 800 to 1400, as well as the Little Ice Age from 1600 to 1850. My school days included hysteria about another ice age. Now there is hysteria that we’re all doomed by a warming spell. The point of my letter was that the Earth has always warmed and cooled and that we should not rely on political foolishness from Al Gore to predict the world’s end in ten years.

Next, what Harper and Gunter seem unwilling to admit or understand is that there is a great deal of “peer reviewed” science on the other side of this question which Harper and Gunter… what, “haughtily” dismiss.

My daughter-in-law’s father is a marine biologist with one of the Atlantic coastal states. He told me he wrote his first research paper while attending DePauw University here in Indiana in 1959, and the topic was “rising sea levels.” He has personally followed that research for himself, for the state that employs him and as an advisory committee member of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Schumick: Yes and there was recently a “peer reviewed” scientific piece that claimed that polar ice has been melting for 100 years, and if it continues at its present rate the Maldives Islands will disappear sometime in the year 2500. Damn, better start packing your stuff.

He has been recognized with numerous awards over the years for his contributions, especially in the area of habitat balance and various organisms that live in coastal estuaries. That balance and its populations are directly affected by the global warming of our planet. He drives a hybrid car and recycles in an attempt to be a good steward of Planet Earth.

Schumick: Good. I’m quite happy that there is at least one person on the other side of this question acting on their convictions unlike so many hypocrites running in circles shouting for an end to the US economy for us mere peons while they continue to enjoy its largess. I applaud Ms. Harper’s daughter-in-law’s father. I’d be more impressed if Ms. Harper were taking such steps.

What contributions are you making, Mr. Schumick?

Schumick: Well a lot more than her hero Al Gore whose movie started this whole brouhaha. You want “An Inconvenient Truth”? Al Gore, has two homes totaling 14,000 square feet. He receives no environmental credits for use of alternative fuels in his homes or fleet of gas guzzling cars. Gore has controlled hundreds of thousands of dollars in Occidental Petroleum stock. Oxy has been mired in controversy over oil drilling in ecologically sensitive areas. Gore gets $20,000 a year from an environmentally unfriendly zinc mine located on one of his properties. He jets around the world on a private plane like we walk to the frig to get a cold one. If people like Al Gore would stay home for a year and stop burning tons upon tons of fule day in and day out, in a hypocritical effort to get the rest of us to stop driving our cars to work, who knows, the Earth’s temperatue might just cool a bit.

On a different note, I’ve sent my responses to the News Sentinel. I’ll keep you posted if they see fit to print one, which to date they have not.

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