Madam, - Never, as they say, let the facts get in the way of a good theory - or in your case, a good story. Take the recent historic EU climate change deal to reduce CO2 emissions. We are currently being bombarded with propaganda that the present cycle of "global warming" is the result of human activity, somehow related to the size of one's "carbon footprint". Nothing could be further from the truth.
Carbon dioxide is a relatively minor "greenhouse gas" compared with, say, water vapour. The historical record of the relationship over millennia between atmospheric CO2 and temperature, as gleaned from measurement on the Antarctic Vostok ice cores, gives us two interesting facts. Global temperature has been changing, both up and down, long before any significant activity on man's part. And changes in atmospheric CO2 have followed the increases and decreases in global temperature.
So, these CO2 changes are not, as we are being persuaded, the causal factor. They are the result of global temperature changes. The atmospheric carbon dioxide level is, depending on the direction of the temperature change, absorbed or released from that vast terrestrial sink, the world's oceans.
Although this is a grossly simplified view of the matter, it is apparent that we must look at solar activity for the cause of global temperature changes.
The polar bear survived the Holocene period when global temperatures were at their height and is still with us today.
- Yours, etc,
JAMES G LACY, Emeritus Professor of Electronic Engineering, UCD, Dublin 4.