To the Editor,
Andrew Weaver makes two errors of scientific method in Tom Fletcher’s Sept. 14 column (B.C. Views, online, www.albernivalleynews.com).
He commits the error of endless extrapolation, as though there were no variation in causal factors and no negative feedback mechanisms.
Second, he fails to look into history – he uses only the period since the climate stopped cooling, which coincides with satellite data becaming available.
(Just prior to that, activists were trying to stampede politicians into controlling people in order to stop global cooling.)
How could the small wooden ship the St. Roch transit the true Northwest Passage several decades ago without the help of the powerful ice breakers that help ships today?
Archaeologists have identified driftwood on Greenland beaches now blocked by ice year round, and traced it back to the areas of the Yukon, Alaska, and Siberia, concluding that 6000 years ago the Arctic Ocean was open enough for ice to travel that far. And there’s evidence that polar bears survived through that period.
A thousand years ago the Vikings farmed Greenland, during what is called the “Medieval Warm Period”, according to archaeologists from the University of Alberta. They gave up a few hundred years later when the climate cooled, toward a low we may still be recovering from.
Weaver is well known as a promoter of the blame-humans theory of climate change. He and fellow alarmists deny a warmer climate existed several times in the past. They ignore fundamental discrepancies between their theories and the reality of sea level changing very slowly, middle atmosphere temperatures not following their predictions, and water vapour changes.
Why does anyone listen to the unscientific negativity of such academics?
Keith Sketchley,
Saanich