Climate change is real, but sensationalizing the dangers doesn’t help

In his Sunday letter, Michael Pravica takes syndicated columnist Jonah Goldberg and other non-scientists to task for weighing in for or against issues associated with climate change. He is correct in doing so.

After stating this concern, however, professor Pravica proceeds to reinforce Mr. Goldberg’s point by painting a doomsday picture of the Earth’s atmosphere returning to a Venus-like toxicity and surface temperatures sky-rocketing hundreds of degrees. This is scare-mongering, plain and simple.

If professor Pravica is following the climate change literature, he is aware that even the most biased, hyperbolic “studies” of climate change stop well short of predicting the 250,000 percent increase in carbon dioxide levels required to match that in Venus’ atmosphere. In point of fact, paleoclimate studies have shown that the predicted increases in carbon dioxide levels have supported very robust biospheres in the past; notably in the Cretaceous period (the so-called “Age of Dinosaurs”) where carbon dioxide levels were roughly three times what they are at present.

Climate change is a very real concern. Depending upon how this change affects weather patterns over the coming decades, millions, perhaps billions, of human lives could be put at risk, especially in such vulnerable areas as sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent. I absolutely agree with professor Pravica that climate change is such a complex and evolving subject that the public would be better served by listening to the studied opinions of scientists and not half-informed assertions made by celebrities, politicians and pundits.

That presupposes, of course, that those scientists do not fall into the same trap of sensationalism that professor Pravica accuses others of.