Re: “Listen to the actual experts” (Dennis Horne, Times, September 14).
Instead of addressing the substance of the Climate Declaration from clintel.org, your correspondent makes an “appeal to ridicule”, ad-hominem attack, implying that Professor Giaever has the wrong kind of intelligence and no sense of humour.
And I wonder if anyone else sees the irony in accusing me of making an “Appeal to Authority” while appealing to the authority of the Royal Society, the National Academy, and the IPCC, along with their “recognised experts” and appealing to the popularity of their “hundreds of thousands of papers”.
Previously, a correspondent asserted: “Some people are certain that their high school education makes them smarter than NASA climate model scientists…”. I was clearly too subtle in my mockery of people who give import to education and credentials when confessing: “I don’t know if he’s as smart as a ‘NASA Climate Model Scientist’”.
Your correspondent has on several occasions repeated well-known “climate alarm” talking points. For every point raised, I have seen at least one well-reasoned “rebuttal”.
Those rebuttals will likely be discounted out-of-hand by your correspondent, authored as they are by scientists who have dared to disagree with the “consensus”, and are now considered “unappealing” by the climate “authorities” and their “actual experts”.
But that does not mean they do not exist.
In the interest of brevity, I will somewhat incompletely comment on just one talking point: that wildfires are more frequent and severe.
Using the US as an example, I will try and put into a few words what really needs several thousand.
Forest fires in the 1930s were much worse and killed many more people than today’s fires. Dropping rapidly from a (recorded) peak around 1930, fire coverage by 1958 was a tenth of what it once was, further declining very slowly until a 1983 low (roughly when the “ice age scare” ended). It has since increased but is still very low relative to the 1930s.
Despite having data going back over 100 years, since 2021 the US government has only reported from 1983 onwards, claiming that earlier data is “unreliable”. Even the 25 years from 1958 that are almost identical to 1983.
Ignoring their reasons for excluding data, it remains absurd to look at just the ~40 years since the end of the ice age scare and claim to have identified a “trend”.
It is also disingenuous to claim increasing CO2 as the major cause for a 40-year trend that matches your theory while claiming it has nothing to do with the previous 50-year trend that does not.
When making bold claims, and bold calls to up-end society, the burden of proof is on those making the claims, not on those questioning them.
The climate alarm industry has certainly not provided enough evidence of a “climate emergency” to justify destroying our way of life for fear of the apocalypse announced by its prophets.
Nor have the people they have frightened with their “science”.
Ryan Price, Half Moon Bay
