Geologists and climate change
I have a few comments to add to your editorial of Aug. 8 (The Kyoto Alternative, OGJ, Aug. 8, 2005, p. 19). Dr. William Gray (no relation) is, probably, the atmospheric researcher most well known by the public at large. In an interview published in the September 2005 Discover Magazine, he supports the same position [on climate change] OGJ took in its editorial. The comments he makes in that article, and your editorial, follow my opinions and are not the politically correct position of the supposedly well-educated, mainstream media.
Discover Magazine, and many other prominent periodical publications, have printed articles stating that humans are the proximate cause of the global warming over the last hundred years and furthermore that this is THE opinion MOST scientists hold.
My opinion of the "most scientists" statement is that if one hears (reads) something often enough it becomes assumed fact. Geologists and others who look at the rock record can tell you that Earth has been much warmer than it is now, and much colder, many times in the past, and that includes the "recent" past. My interpretation of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists' official position on the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change is that while they don
Global warming is a fact and has been a (pleasantly increasing one for us humans!) fact for the last 10,000 years. We have undisputed evidence that the Earth's ice has been melting for more than 10,000 years or so. As geologists, we know that the present is the key to the past and the future. Global warming is a fact, and so is global cooling. It is the human causation that is the fantasy and has been a fantasy since the 1980s, when someone figured out that government grant money would be showered upon him who could come up with the need to study a sufficiently great potential disaster. And now the produced disaster scenario becomes a self-perpetuating money pot.
It is time for more of us, as scientists, to be counted in the "it just isn't so" column and to stand up to the politically correct mainstream media and their distortions of fact.
We, as geologists, are lovers of the Earth, but we shouldn't allow ourselves to be used, or included in, the media�s lie: "the opinion most scientists hold."
William Gray
Geologist
Houston
