CARTOON: Art, or propaganda?

In the Friday, Sept. 18 edition of The Press was an editorial cartoon by Mike Smith depicting eight separate images of the same small house, each with one word above it shown as spoken by someone within the house and together forming the sentence; “There is no such thing as global warming.” Each image of the house in the sequence is presented with a decreasing number of trees around it, starting with 10 trees I believe surrounding the little house in the first box, until the last image shows the house with no trees at all around it.

No matter how we ultimately interpret the specific point implied with the piece, this was obviously created to mock global warming skeptics. If the implication is that a warming trend automatically results in fewer trees and this being the evidence that global warming is real, then I would just say the artist should probably take a refresher course in basic biology.

The anthropogenic global warming model suggests that increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide causes the increases in temperature due to the greenhouse effect of the CO2. Whether this actually plays out in our climate or not, since water vapor is a vastly more significant greenhouse gas than is CO2, it is a scientific fact that CO2 is plant food, and that more of it in our atmosphere means greener and thicker vegetation, not less!

JIM BALLOU

Hayden