Letter to editor: Morgantown Dominion Post, Sunday, Nov. 29, 2015

Is the congressman so out of touch that he does not even read the federal budget proposals? Or that he no longer recognizes how many abandoned mines and how much acid mine drainage there is to clean up right here in West Virginia?

Those funds would hire a lot of workers who need work, and help transition our economy by cleaning up polluted sites and returning them to productive uses. For our congressman (Rep. David McKinley) to ignore such a proposal to help our own district is incomprehensible, and just bad politics.

But an even bigger whopper was, when asked about climate change, he said that global temperatures stopped rising 18 years ago. This is a frequent claim from those denying climate change, but is absolutely false on several levels.

First the claim is based on the unusually warm temperatures associated with the record El Nino event in 1998. Starting from that peak, annual global temperature increases do appear to have slowed, which is why the claim of “18 years ago” is used.

But if you look at trends starting 17 years ago, or 19 years ago, or 20, or 30 or 40, the temperature trends are consistently upward. The congressman claims to rely on science, but his cherry-picking the data is simply wrong.

And even more wrong is that, even if one begins with the record temperatures in 1998, new records were set in 2005, only to be broken in 2010, and that record was broken in 2014, and the planet will likely set a new record in 2015. Those are not the results one would expect if temperatures really had stopped rising in 1998.

The congressman is simply wrong. This has been explained to him repeatedly, and yet he continues to disseminate ianncurate information to the public. This starts to look deliberate.

Finally, the format of the so-called “town hall” did not allow for any reasoned discussion. Because only he was allowed to speak, the audience never had a chance to challenge his misstatements. Energy issues are important to our state, and regardless of which side you are on, we deserve better.

Jim Kotcon, Morgantown

From the Associated Press, Boston Herald, November 21, 2015

BOSTON — MIT students, faculty members and community leaders are planning to hold a vigil to mark what they say is an unwelcome milestone in humanity’s battle against climate change.

Organizers of Monday’s event at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say the vigil is meant to mark the final days that anyone now alive will ever again experience atmospheric carbon dioxide levels less than 400 parts per million.

The threshold of 350 parts per million of CO2 is considered by many scientists as the safe upper limit to avoid dangerous climate change.

The “Farewell 400″ is part of a larger effort by students and activists to pressure MIT to divest its multi-billion dollar endowment from fossil fuels.

The university last month announced a five-year plan to combat climate change but said it would not divest.

Source: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/local_coverage/2015/11/mit_students_faculty_marking_end_of_lower_co2_levels