I feel I must respond to the letter from Dave Secco on Dec. 19 (Climate change not in doubt).
Mr. Secco takes me to task for my letter of Dec. 12, which the Oak Bay News curiously titled “Climate change far from certain”, even though I made no such claim. Secco accuses me of making “wild claims” when in fact I made none. My letter made three statements: 1) an ocean level rise of one metre in a century is highly unlikely given that the norm is seven inches per century; 2) David Suzuki’s claim that the 10 hottest years ever all occurred since 1998 is factually incorrect; and 3) during the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) the Earth was much warmer than today, another fact.
Secco continued with the usual “the sky is falling” doomsday scenarios for our planet and went on to claim that the MWP, which occurred between 950 and 1250 AD, actually occurred 3,000 years ago. Then he asserts that the IPCC has debunked the MWP as not actually occurring in the first place. Is that the same IPCC that admitted last spring that 111 out of 114 of its climate change “models” have over-estimated temperatures since 1998? I’ll leave it to the wise readers out there to decide who is making the wild claims.
Secco also referred to me as a “climate denier”. I assure you I am quite the opposite because I am keenly aware that the climate of this planet has been changing, at times dramatically, for tens of thousands of years. Temperatures rise and fall by as much as 2 C naturally, and have been doing so since long before there were SUVs and coal-fired power plants. The true climate deniers are the human-hating alarmists that refuse to admit that most (if not all) climate change occurs irrespective of human influences.
I encourage Mr. Secco to visit Wikipedia and read up about the Medieval Warming Period. Yes it’s still there, despite the IPCC’s efforts to whitewash it from the history books. It’s also called the “Medieval Climate Optimum” because it is generally accepted that temperatures at that time were the hottest that our planet has ever seen.
And while you’re there, do some research on the Little Ice Age that occurred between 1550 and 1850, when temperatures were much colder than normal. During this time the River Thames froze most winters, and they invented the game of ice hockey on the frozen ponds of England (that don’t freeze any more). I am very interested in the Little Ice Age because with no measurable increase in atmospheric temperatures since 1998 (despite a 20 per cent increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations) I fear we may be headed into another one. This could be very detrimental to my golf game.
D. Gramlich
Oak Bay