Columnist “misinformed,” says reader

August 10, 2023 · 0 Comments

OUR READERS WRITE

I know that newspaper columnists are given wide latitude to provide their personal musings without fact checking but the recent “Are we under water yet?” by Brian Lockhart is disturbingly misinformed in my opinion.

If oil companies keep looking for more oil and develop new techniques for extraction such as fracking or streaming tar sands, then the estimates of potentially available oil will increase (only for a time. Oil is not unlimited). Lower estimates came from less information, not from a secret conspiracy. The problem now is the effects of burning it, not how much of it there is.

Sea Level at the Statue of Liberty typically varies about six feet through the year and tidally several feet every day. Comparison of two photographs taken at random times during a tidal cycle in 1920 and 2022 are clearly meaningless in relation to long-term Sea Level rise.

The recovery of the level of ozone in the atmosphere back toward natural level, and thus the associated level of protection from skin cancer, cataracts and other harmful effects, is real and the result of international cooperation to phase out chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), known as the Montreal Protocol and subsequent treaties.

And so on…

My main point is that, in order to develop our understanding of environmental phenomena of global significance to our children and grandchildren, we should listen to the consensus of people who have devoted their education and careers to gathering and interpreting calibrated measurements of that phenomena and not to a sports writer.

Brian Wannamaker

Caledon East