News Sentinel provides balance. Lex answers Harper.

The Ft. Wayne News Sentinel came through and published my response to David Gunter on Friday last. That letter is just below. The bit that follows is my response to B. J. Harper’s direct question to me. I asked the News Sentinel to allow me to respond to that question. Barring any further ad hominid attacks, this is about as much time as I’m willing to spend on this subject.

David Gunter wrote a column in last Friday’s News Sentinel responding to my views on global warming. Gunter is a chemical engineer and environmental scientist trained at MIT. He's also a lawyer. Gunter totally distorted what I wrote. For such a lettered man, you'd think Gunter could have made a better, or at least more honest argument.

If Gunter can re-read my article and point out to me where I claim the Earth is not in a warming cycle, I’ll buy him a steak dinner. I never made any such claim. But Gunter is right about one thing, I have about as much chance of passing a high school science class that uses the truth acording to Al Gore's foolish movie as I do of passing a high school history class that uses Oliver Stone and Michael Moore movies as references for world events.

The point of my letter was simply to call attention to the fact that the Earth has cooled and warmed in cycles since the beginning of time. 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 Earth has warmed between one-half and one degree over the last century. But the Earth has always cooled and warmed. We should not rely on political foolishness from Al Gore to predict the world’s end in ten years based on events that have occured naturally since the begining of time.

Gunter made several other equally glaring mischaraterizations of what I wrote, but this was the most fundamental.

Lex Answers Harper’s question:

In a recent letter to the editor Ms. B. J. Harper asked me, “What contributions are you making [to conserve energy and help save the planet], Mr.Schumick?”

Well apparently a whole lot more than her hero Al Gore whose ridiculous movie started this whole brouhaha. Would you like “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 fuel 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 temperature might just cool a bit.