Letter jumped to conclusion about climate change

By Letter to the Editor on March 16, 2020.

Re: “Canada’s laughable quest to be a climate hero,” March 11

Fact checking reveals that the author’s numbers regarding global mortality from natural disasters are more or less correct (ourworldindata.org/natural-disasters). However, he makes no logical connection between these facts and the conclusion to which he jumps that climate change is not real. We must hope that the data used did not include deaths due to earthquake or volcanic activity which cannot be attributed to climate change.

In January 2018 Scientific American published an article entitled “Ask the Experts: Does Rising CO2 Benefit Plants?”, which concluded as follows.

“Researchers do not yet know why higher atmospheric CO2 alters crops’ nutritional content. But, Myers says, ‘the bottom line is, we know that rising CO2 reduces the concentration of critical nutrients around the world,’ adding that these kinds of nutritional deficiencies are already significant public health threats, and will only worsen as CO2 levels go up. ‘The problem with (the skeptics’) argument is that it’s as if you can cherry-pick the CO2 fertilization effect from the overall effect of adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere,’ Myers says. But that is not how the world – or its climate – works.”

Fred Lewis

Medicine Hat

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