It is with some disappointment that I read yet another letter attempting to argue the science of climate change. It is even more disappointing to see that yet again arguments are presented which have been thoroughly disproven, some as long ago as the 1990s.
Most of the recent letters have presented silly points and basic misunderstandings that readily show the writers have not even looked at what the climate scientists have had to say. If you want to argue a point you should at least find out what it actually is.
To clear up a couple of recent ones, the ‘carbon’ implicated in climate change is not actually the solid pure form such as soot but is a media abbreviation for carbon dioxide which in itself is a metaphorical description which includes all the greenhouse gases. So in the climate change discussion ‘carbon’ is not black where it would block out the sun nor does it ‘float on air’ and rise like helium or sink like dust, but the greenhouse gases mix through the atmosphere by wind action.
The issue of sea level rise is not just a matter of melting polar ice. There is a huge amount of ice sitting on land, the South Pole ice and the Greenland ice being the big ones. Melting these would raise sea levels a fair bit but the major rise would come from raising the temperature of the water that is already in the oceans, tens of millions of cubic kilometres of it. As it absorbs heat from the warmer air, the water expands. The full extent of the rise will take hundreds of years as it will take a long time for heat to soak through the whole of all the oceans but it will happen.
As for silly arguments like how do you weigh the ‘carbon’ to put a tax on it, it is a simple matter of chemistry. Businesses burning carbon based fuels buy the material they burn by weight and chemistry can tell us how much ‘carbon’ results from burning it.
Anyone wanting to find out how climate change works should really have a thorough look at what the climate scientists have actually said and then think carefully what this would mean for the world we live in and what we should do if we don’t like what is coming.
Paul Carberry
Tamworth
