Re: “Is global cooling an inconvenient fact?” letter to the editor, Huntsville Forester, March 12.

In his letter to the editor, Mr. Grainger states his opinion that we’re now in a period of global cooling and asks why there is a general suppression by environmentalists and the media of inconvenient facts that support this.

He says that in one year the average global temperature has cooled approximately one degree. There were indeed changes made to data measuring global warming in the United States but, when these changes were applied to the whole globe, the effect on global temperatures was in the order of one-thousandths of a degree. The years from 2000 to 2007 are all among the warmest on record. Even without these inconvenient facts, how. Mr. Grainger. do you explain Arctic sea ice melting at a rate far ahead of computer predictions? Earlier indications had been for an ice-free Arctic by 2040 but last year’s melt has led one of the Arctic’s leading scientists to revise this back to the summer of 2013. Why are glaciers and ice sheets across the globe also melting at an increasing rate? The World Glacier Monitoring Service notes that 2006 saw the biggest net loss of ice from glaciers (with 2007 figures not yet available).

The melt in Greenland started in 1979 and has been accelerating since, with the decade to 2006 doubling the rate of melt of the previous decade. Why is permafrost melting causing infrastructure losses throughout the polar regions? How do you explain these observable, albeit to you, inconvenient truths?

Could it be that the warming trend may be held in check, in part at least, by the energy used to melt these vast expanses of ice? Scientists are looking at other causes for this (including the part played by aerosols). It must be kept in mind that Mother Nature is a truly complicated woman with many of her reasons for acting as she does far from clear.

You state that man-made global carbon dioxide emissions are less than one half of one percent (and ask what government is doing to reduce non-man-made carbon dioxide). How do you explain, since the industrial revolution, an increase from 280 ppm to our present 385 ppm, in the absence of natural causes such as extensive volcanic activity? In fact, data from ice cores show our present level to be higher than at any time during the last 650,000 years, with other evidence pointing to highs last attained 60,000 million years ago.

If you’d stated your objections to the lack of government action to reduce non-carbon dioxide human-caused forcings of other greenhouse gases (such as methane), you might have received some support from me.

Lastly, you cite as an example of an inconvenient fact, the record-setting snowy cold winter across Muskoka, Ontario and North America this year. On the next page to your letter, Dave Phillips, senior climatologist with Environment Canada, is quoted by Carlye Malchuk as saying that Muskoka has been warmer than normal this year. You’re correct in noting excessive (and record-setting) snow accumulations. I doubt that science would let you blame this on global cooling.

Please look further into the observable data available, Mr. Grainger. Global warming is real and our responses to it must be urgent. In a recent draft paper co-authored by eight others, James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, states that humans need to reverse course on emissions rapidly to avoid a centuries-long slide to conditions profoundly different from those that saw the rise and spread of modern civilization.

Mary McCulley
Huntsville