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MORE DATA NEEDED
Coby Beck's article based on extracts from an article in Grist [Cover story, Jan. 24: "
"] should better have been titled "How to Talk to a Simpleton," as he repeats a number
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of errors, omissions and crude propaganda.
First, I do not disagree with the basic premise of warming since we are emerging from the geologically recent Ice Ages. The real questions, though, are about the magnitude and causes of such warming. There is no proven causality between the increase in CO2 levels and such warming, so a skeptical posture is a rational position especially since there have been warmer and cooler periods outside the historical range of industrial pollution. The amount of recent warming is miniscule, approximately 1 degree F based on data mainly from ground weather stations whose readings are probably exaggerated due to the well-known urban heat island effects. There is a considerable body of literature that indicates that changes in solar radiation plus complex, long-term feedback mechanisms, both negative as well as positive, should be explored in order to understand climate change.
Predictions of future climates have been heavily influenced by simulations from computer-generated global climate models. However, these have not proven useful since such models are not even able to accurately simulate known climate changes over the past 50 years. There are more serious issues with such models as they predict warming rather than cooling of the stratosphere and their estimates of future global temperatures are highly inconsistent and have large margins of error.
Consensus in science is, as Thomas Kuhn noted, simply a social construct and has more to do with grants, job security and professional status than truth. There has been a vicious campaign to exclude or silence dissenting scientists by the journals Nature, Science and Scientific American, not to mention the attack by the Danish Committee for Scientific Honesty on Bjorn Lomborg, a highly respected environmentalist.
Why should the US willingly risk economic disaster by signing up for Kyoto or some variant thereof whilst the economies of India and China are not bound by any restrictions? Should not more effort be put into dealing with real world problems rather than carbon caps or emission trading (basically more sin taxes), which are hardly likely to change the CO2 levels, if they mattered.
As a footnote, I would like to add that when I studied climatology back in the 1970s, the prevailing concern was not warming but global cooling.
David Brown
Santa Fe
ANIMAL ATHLETES
The recent article, "
" [Jan. 24], by Julia Goldberg, is an insult to your readers' intelligence. It is very clear that Ms. Goldberg is parroting the same old tired, stale, trite rubbish of the animal rights movement (which I and the FBI collectively refer to as the animal rights terrorists [ART]). It is full of half-truths, innuendo and outright lies as is all ART propaganda.
Yes, cockfighting is a blood sport, just like fishing and hunting. It is certainly no more cruel than catching a fish with a barbed hook or shooting a six-point buck during deer season. These creatures always lose to man, whereas, in the gamecock case, at least 50 percent live-oh yes, that's considerably more than live through their visit at 8 weeks of age to the factories of Col. Sanders, and Mr. Tyson also. That is, they live until they are put to death in a gas chamber (not "put to sleep"), by their humane rescuers! Does that not make felons out of them? It should; the fowl are just as dead.
However, I am not against anyone's right to use animals as they see fit, cruel or not, as long as it is not torture, just because I don't happen to agree with it. Just because a small, well-funded group of people don't like what another group is doing is no reason to outlaw that group. But we all know that to our current batch of politicians at both the state and federal levels, money talks and buys many votes, just like the out-of-staters who come into states for pay, and illegally gather signatures for petitions to the courts to place referendums on the state ballots to make illegal whatever it is they or their hiring groups don't like.
In addition, I have been around cockfighting for more than 45 years, and have seen about five fistfights there. Many fewer than I saw at my first or any subsequent Friday night high school football game. And yes, there were stimulants given to birds, not to make them more aggressive, but to increase their performance just like human and other animal athletes. These, for the most part, are the drugs the ARTs like to refer to in their media releases and interviews. And Ms. Goldberg's statement that game fowl won't fight to the death in their natural state or free-ranged, preposterous! Gee, why do you think they are called "game" fowl?
Well gosh, I'm sure that you're tired of reading something that doesn't fit in with your narrow view of the universe, so I will close for now. Oh, by the way, I am a Vietnam veteran, and a patriot who served for more than 33 years as a federal executive in the Intelligence and Command and Control Community of the Department of Defense, holding a top-secret security clearance with special access privileges for that full term. My children? Are they both animal torturers or serial killers? No, one is a registered nurse working in the OR of a major hospital, and another is a lieutenant in a large fire and rescue service, and also with more than five years military service to his country.
Ronald K Gray
Marshall, VA
WINE WIN-WIN
Your "
" [Outtakes, Jan. 24] comments on Rep. Jim Trujillo's HB 124, which will allow restaurant patrons to legally cork a partially consumed bottle of wine and take it home, suggest this bill will somehow encourage drunk driving. I fail to see your logic.
Quite the contrary. The present system leaves a restaurant patron with a dilemma: Leave an often expensive and partially consumed bottle of wine sitting on the table to be cleared with the dirty dishes, or finish off the bottle and take one's chances on the road. I'm sure that more than a few patrons choose the latter, putting themselves and others at risk.
If anything, Rep. Trujillo's bill will encourage people to cork that bottle and switch to mineral water, since they can take the remaining
Vitis vinifera
home to be consumed as a nightcap after the car is safely parked for the night. Sounds like a win-win situation to me. Why do you disagree?
Khalil J Spencer
Los Alamos
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