With climate change as relevant to our future as it is, I think it’s worth giving a counter-argument to some of the “facts” presented in this column, particularly for readers who might be swayed by climate change misinformation. I’m not sure why the author is citing what ABC News said in 2008 as proof that the science behind global warming is still doubtful. Most scientists aren’t concerned with what the news says you should be scared of (although these days, it seems like everything). The fact that we’re not underwater already doesn’t disprove global warming. If you’re unconvinced of the science, you should do some more reading. The link between what we as people are doing and global warming has about the same consensus in the scientific community as does the link between smoking and lung cancer, with compelling evidence coming from scientists around the world from multiple fields of study. I’m also not sure why you cited the article by James Taylor in Forbes. Not only did he blatantly lie about where his data was from (said it was from NASA, which it was not), the source of the data, Univ. of Illinois, even came out with a statement that Taylor cherry-picked their data. Lying, plagiarism and cherry-picking. There’s a reason this article only made it to Forbes as it probably wouldn’t even have made it out of a peer-review. If you’re looking for science, I would look for it in a science magazine, not a business magazine. Climate denialists seem to keep confusing their opinion and misleading data with facts, and others’ facts with opinions and misleading data. If you’re talking about budgets and deficits, only a fraction of the annual production of greenhouse gases by people is offset by natural sinks (trees, oceans, soil). That puts us in a big deficit. The U.S. is in the top five for greenhouse gas emissions. We’re also in the top tier for climate change skepticism. Go figure. You may be right that it’d be better for the environment to reign in overconsumption, but it’d be better to present this with more reliable information. 

Bryan Maxwell

graduate student, biological and agricultural engineering