Yesterday, I wrote a
diary responding to a right wing article trying to discredit Al Gore and the issue of anthropogenic climate change in general. This morning I was lucky enough to receive a reply from Michael Graham. His response is fairly rude, but he cites three actual sources that completely fail to make any real point on the facts behind climate change. Below the flip I've reprinted his letter and my response. Enjoy...
According to a 1998 study by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), the Kyoto treaty would cost the U.S. economy $400 billion per year, raise electric utility bills by 86%, hike the cost of heating oil by 76% and impose a permanent "Kyoto gasoline tax" of 66 cents per gallon. In total, if Kyoto were adopted each U.S. household would have to spend an extra $1,740 per year on energy.
As for the emailers total lack of information on what's happening to the ice sheets, he could start here:
http://www.sciencemag.org/...
and then here:
http://www.sciencemag.org/...
There's much, much more, but since it's actual science and not knee-jerk rhetoric, he's obviously not interested.
Michael Graham
www.michaelgraham.com
It's a fun little letter, that completely ignored my main point that there is a scientific consensus that climate change is real and caused by human action. My response is below.
Mr. Graham,
First off, thank you for your response, but it only furthered my point. I never said that we are losing ice in every corner of the globe, neither has Al Gore, or any other climate scientist. That was a strawman argument that you setup. You have not combated any global warming arguments with those two links, and you never even tried to argue that we aren't as a planet losing a great deal of polar and non-polar ice. The fact is your arguments don't hold up to the very broad scope that the issue of climate change requires us to take.
As to the cost of implementing the Kyoto Protocols, the report you cite from 1998 was not comprehensive in that it failed to consider energy efficiency as an effective and inexpensive method of reducing green house gas emissions. William Nordhaus and Joseph Boyer, two prominent climate scientists, were the authors of the paper I cited with the $325 billion estimate in 2000 were co-authors of the paper you cite from 1998, so they would be aware of any gross discrepancies between the two. In any event we can honestly debate what needs to be done about climate change once the public is no longer deceived by people like you who try to deny its true nature and the scientific consensus behind it. Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Jawis
Posted to Daily Kos Environmentalists.