Letter to the Editor
Dear Editor,
Your editorial calling Councillor Greenfield a ‘conservative’ and a ‘dinosaur’ was meant to belittle him but failed. His questioning of a ‘crisis’ is a responsible position to take. Official government records are out there to help investigate claims of crisis, and we trust they are unprejudiced.
World crop production is twice population rate; Canadian forest fires have greatly decreased in number since 1990, and bear no relation to NASA temperatures or CO2; coastal land subsidence from natural isostasy raises sea level; impervious surfaces in the urban built-environment increase flooding; cities heat up storm water and degrade surface waters. Many natural and man-made factors affect our environment, on Earth and in our open solar system, not just carbon emissions.
Toronto and other cities are permanent heat sources, water vapour sources and CO2 sources. These combustion products ‘dome up’ over the urban area and push out into surrounding countryside – envisage a pot-belly stove. Owen Sound warmed only 0.05°C in 1917 – 2003 over the 40 years before 1917, whereas Toronto heated up 1.2°C. Lack of regional heating when Owen Sound otherwise recorded global events like Krakatau leaves little room for substantial ‘global greenhouse effect’ or crisis due to CO2 … except in a political sense.
Our Georgian Bay air and water have been cooling over the last 10 – 20 years, not warming, in opposition to the ever-rising CO2 trend. CO2 is anthropogenic but it has no evident bearing on temperature history. It’s good that China is planting trees, but they also needed to.
Mr. Editor, half of us will always be liberal and half conservative; you can’t have one without the other. Dismissing someone as ‘liberal’ or ‘female’ is not an insult when half the population are included no matter what they’re called.
Dinosaurs were a spectacular part of our faunal heritage, possibly in long decline before the dooming volcanic and asteroid events. Hopefully we will survive real crises due to climate warming or climate cooling, just as the avian dinosaurs survived to develop into our beautiful bird population. Also hopefully we fully understand what tree we are barking up before we disassemble our wonderful Canada.
The editorial has the semblance of a temporary ‘Trump Tantrum Tweet’ moment, as we all have had, but now an apology is due to our hard-working and supportive Councillor Harley Greenfield.
Craig Jowett, Ph.D., P.Eng.
Meaford
