Climate change column & cartoon were misleading

I noted Thomas Sowell’s column about climate change and the cartoon you picked to go with it in the Feb. 3 issue of the Daily Inter Lake and must reprimand both of you for these scientific misrepresentations.  

In that column and cartoon, the question is asked “if we could not more accurately predict the magnitude of the recent storm in NYC, how can we predict the climate change we might experience over the next 100 years?”

If you understood just a bit about “weather” versus “climate,” you would know that local weather is very much more difficult to predict than long-term global average climate changes.  

Local weather prediction is done via the science of meteorology  which requires both measurements and complex models in order to include the multitude of variables involved. Its object is to predict how the existing heat and energy is being spread via its atmosphere and oceans. Because of its great complexity, the weather expected even tomorrow at any given location is often in large error. 

The science of global climate change, however, concerns changes in the total heat and energy content of the Earth over time and this is determined by only three relatively well-understood variables. These variables are: the solar flux at our position in our solar system, the albedo of the Earth (its refection of incoming sunlight) and the insulating effect of the greenhouse gases and clouds. Of these three variables, the last one is very much out of control and has changed remarkably over the Industrial Age — due primarily to large increases in carbon dioxide and methane in our atmosphere. Thus, just as you would get warmer if you put on a heavier coat, so will the Earth.   

By tying local weather uncertainty to that of total Earth energy balance, I suspect that the Inter Lake and Mr. Sowell were being intentionally devious and that your intent was simply to spread “doubt” in our scientist’s ability to predict long-term global warming.  

The “info” Sowell provided only concerned the recent storm in the Norrtheast and from that, you naughty boys suggested that long-term predictions of man-caused global warming are suspect! How long must the enormous problem posed by global warming be on the front pages of our newspapers before editors stop promoting the most worn-out and infantile misrepresentations of it? —Eric Grimsrud, Liberty Lake, Wash.