LETTER: Can we really trust scientists' assumptions?

The global warming/climate change debate ass/u/me’s that any change from the status quo is BAD. Is this really true and is it factual?

In a recent Inter Lake article, NOAA and NASA said that the 1.5 degree warming change was a threshold from pre-industrial times set by world leaders. They also said that 1.5 to 2 degrees was not a “magical number.” They base these measurements on 136 years of data, but didn’t the Industrial Age begin before 1880 in Europe?

In his book “1421: The Year China Discovered America” (also shown on PBS), Mr. Menzies refers to the mapping of the north coast of Greenland (by the Chinese? by ship?). He also discusses the wedding of Sigrid Bjornsdottir in 1408 (p. 349), which is preserved in the state archives in Oslo. At that time Greenland was green. It had lush pastures on which sheep grazed from 50 days after Easter until the second week of September. The summers of 1422-1428 were exceptionally warm, but that all changed with the mini ice age of the 1430s. What a contrast to the snow- and ice-covered Greenland we know today.

Yes, climate change is real and is occurring now. I don’t know what caused the exceptionally warm Greenland of 1408, nor the mini ice age of the 1430s, but I bet it wasn’t industrial burning of fossil fuel. I also do not buy the “warmest in thousands of years” speech or the assumption that a little global warming is bad. Much of this is based on “grasshopper theories.” However, I do not own stock in solar or wind-powered generation companies like Al Gore so I am probably not qualified to speak on these subjects. —Warren Williamson, Lakeside