CLIMATE: Acknowledge problem

It’s good that Randy Mann is open to discussing Earth’s changing climate, but in his response to my letter he manages to again conspicuously avoid acknowledging the role of “anthropogenic (human influenced) global warming (AGW).” “Climate change” is a related but also a separate topic.

Anthropogenic global warming will have a major negative effect on mankind’s ability to maintain adequate food and water supplies for the world’s population. It will also make highly populated areas in the tropics and subtropics uninhabitable due to extreme heat and possibly also to related drought. It is climate change due to AGW that will be responsible for these outcomes.

No one is saying that “mankind’s harmful effects are entirely responsible for this change,” but the vast majority of scientists attribute the current global warming situation to the increasing amount of greenhouse gases, principally CO2 but also methane, that are in the atmosphere due to human activity.

There are not “countless arguments” on both sides of this issue. More than 97 percent of peer-reviewed scientific papers published on the topic of global warming support the hypothesis that global warming is real, problematic and exacerbated by human activity. Of the 3 percent that don’t support these conclusions most, if not all, have been found to have errors in their assumptions, methodology or analysis.

My question remains, “How many more years of increasingly hot, record-breaking temperatures will it take for Randy to acknowledge the reality of anthropogenic global warming?”

WALTER W. WILSON JR.

Everett, Wash.