This is a letter to the editor I published at the Daily Advance. Posted here for posterity, since they have no online archive:
I applaud The Daily Advance’s new “Green Living” section on your Web site and Robert Kelly-Goss’s recent highly-informative article on global warming. However, the article did contain one factual error that needs correcting: there is no debate on global warming’s cause —2,000 economists, 110 Nobel laureates, and more than 300,000 people petitioning Congress have all signed statements affirming that global warming is being caused by humans and that we need to take immediate action to curb its effects.
Of the more than 928 peer-reviewed scientific journal articles published on the subject, not a single one disagrees with the consensus position that global warming is real and our carbon-emissions are behind it. The scientists at the Union of Concerned Scientists, National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the 2,500 scientists behind the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report all agree that we are causing this climate crisis. This is why Republicans brought Michael Crichton, a science-fiction author, before Congress to refute climatologists on the subject; why the Bush administration closed EPA libraries last October; why an oil lobbyist was allowed to remove all scientific conclusions from U.S. Climate Change Science Program reports; and why ExxonMobil even went so far as to recently offer $10,000 to any scientist who would dispute the scientific consensus. So long as they can keep us uncertain, we won’t take action, which means they win.
We have a right to nuclear, solar, and wind energy. We have a right to improved gas-mileage in our cars. Most of all, we have a right for our children (who) live in Elizabeth City, as rising sea levels will turn them into refugees over the next century just so that oil companies can continue to rake in record profits.
And if logical conjecture based on overwhelming evidence isn’t enough, then we ought to take action simply to end the insanity of Americans borrowing trillions of dollars from communist China to give to totalitarian regimes in the Middle East.