Letter to the Editor: Questions climate change story

Don Tumilson, Charles City

In the Oct. 31, 2017, Press was an article that doctors claimed that global warming was taking a toll on people’s health.

With the very slight increase in the temperature over the last 137 years, that is impossible.

Global warming alarmists claim that carbon dioxide is causing the earth’s temperature to rise. That is not true! The primary greenhouse gas, which is responsible for the vast majority of the greenhouse effect, is water vapor. Carbon dioxide, the second most common greenhouse gas, provides only a tiny fraction of the greenhouse effect.

Also, some people seem to forget we need carbon dioxide to live. Trees, all food crops and every other living plant cannot survive without carbon dioxide. They in turn give off oxygen that we need in order to live.

These people want us to spend trillions of dollars to solve a problem that does not exist. That cost will hurt the poor from around the world the most.

Studies show that the up and down changes in the temperature is caused by the activity of the sun (sunspots). When there are more sunspots, the earth’s temperature rise, when there are few sunspots the earth’s temperature cools.

Other natural causes are El Nino, a warming of the ocean near the Pacific equator and volcanic eruptions which actually cool the earth when they spread tiny particles into the stratosphere, which reflect some of the sunlight back into space. It has been observed that this cools the earth up to about one degree for a few years when there is a higher amount of volcanic eruptions.

There are more complex reasons for temperature changes but this would be too long of a letter to explain them.