Editor,
In response to Mic Mead’s letter in the Aug. 6 edition, I must pass on his assertion that a Democrat shouldn’t run on climate issues. They are the only candidates that do, so I’m not sure what his point was.
That is not the greatest of my concern over his letter. First, he implies that all living things are made of carbon and, as such, CO2 is good for them. Well, cyanide is made up of carbon and nitrogen (80 percent of the air you breathe is nitrogen, so cyanide is good for you, right?).
My main beef with Mr. Mead’s assertions, though, is his lame sources of facts. The statement he refers to regarding thousands of scientists signing a petition denouncing the detrimental effects of climate change was called the Global Warming Petition Project (or the Oregon Project) that ran from 1999 to 2001 urging the U.S. to disavow the Kyoto Accords of 1997. Three criticisms of this effort have been made over the last couple decades. First, the language of the petition was pretty extreme “…in the foreseeable future, will cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.” Scientists tend to be pretty exact and may take words like catastrophic seriously. Second, no competing statement was offered in order to gauge the level of consensus. Third, virtually none of the signatories of the petition actually work in the field or have even been trained in that area.
Tom Castle, Westfield
