Like the rest of the people writing to the Gazette about climate change, I am not a climate scientist.

Consequently, since I have become somewhat wary of the ad nauseam onslaught of fear-mongering generated by my fellow non-scientists, I decided to look into different viewpoints, of which there are quite a few. Unfortunately, it seems like the Gazette and the rest of the mainstream media relentlessly promote the overly simplistic and erroneous theory of climate change, saying that it is determined by the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Apparently they are not interested in listening to valid contrary viewpoints. They intentionally neglect to inform the public about any event that doesn’t fit their narrative. The most recent example of this is that we were not told that official NASA data regarding the global average temperature shows it dropped sharply from February 2016 to February 2018 by 0.56 degrees Celsius, the biggest two-year drop in the past century. Why wasn’t this fact reported by the media?

Dr. Richard Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at MIT, gave a lecture last Oct. 8 to the Global Warming Policy Foundation. In it he makes the point that, although global warming promoters offer a simple explanation that the global average temperature is due to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, he says it “is a thoroughly unscientific concept.”

He goes to point out that, in reality, the Earth’s climate system is probably the most complex system ever studied and that CO2’s role in controlling the global average temperature is at most 2 percent. He concluded the lecture saying, “So there you have it. An implausible conjecture backed by false evidence and repeated incessantly has become politically correct ‘knowledge’ and is being used to promote the overturn of industrial civilization. What we will be leaving our grandchildren is not a planet damaged by industrial progress, but a record of unfathomable silliness as well as a landscape degraded by rusting wind farms and decaying solar panel arrays. False claims about 97 percent agreement will not spare us, but the willingness of scientists to keep mum is likely to much reduce trust in and support for science.

Perhaps this will not be such a bad thing after all — certainly as concerns ‘official’ science. There is at least one positive aspect to the present situation. None of the proposed policies will have much impact on greenhouse gases. Thus we will continue to benefit from the one thing that can clearly be attributed to the unabated CO2: namely its effective role as a plant fertilizer and reducer of the drought vulnerability of plants.”

Most hoaxes have been perpetrated and exposed in present time. The ingenious aspect of the claim that humans cause climate change is that it is a prediction of what might happen, thereby escaping exposure in the present. Include a simple scientific term like CO2 that most everybody would accept as credible, relentlessly hammer it home and you’ve succeeded in duping an awful lot of people.

There’s the adage that says sex sells in advertising. So does science. Just look at the TV ads.

Bob Couch

Easthampton