In a recent letter to the editor I warned of the law of unintended consequences when it came to changes made for the sake of fighting global warming. If you were paying close attention to the news, you would notice that we are already starting to see some of these consequences. Food prices have soared as grain crops are diverted to biofuels as directed by government law in some countries and influenced by subsidies in others. Land once used to grow food is now being used to produce ethanol. The law of supply and demand has kicked in raising prices. Food riots have erupted in Africa and Asia.

We are seeing very real problems arising from our attempt to address a perceived, by some, problem that evidence is mounting to tell us may not even be real or appreciably influenced by human actions.

A recent plot of global temperature overlaid with atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration shows that while carbon dioxide has steadily increased, the global temperature has decreased over the past ten years. If you look back hundreds of millions of years in geologic history you will see that the Earth’s temperature has been on a roller coaster ride long before the automobile and coal fired power plants. Where is the correlation to human produced carbon dioxide?

A letter to the editor last week claimed that 90 percent of all scientists agreed with the human caused global warming theory. I don’t know how one can go about calculating something like that but undoubtedly some of those who do agree are poor scientists. Take Paul Ehrlich, a fervent global warming proponent, who has been incorrectly predicting the demise of the planet since 1970. For a rather amusing compendium of his and other scientists and politicians environmental disaster predictions that haven’t come true, see the Nation Center for Policy Analysis (a non-partisan organization) website.

Don’t discount the money factor in science, either. There are more than a few researchers influenced by the flow of grant money. No man made warming equals no grant money. Just wait until our politicians try to take a cut of the action. If you think ‘carbon credits’ have intrinsic value I’ve got a bridge to sell to you.

For me I’ll listen to scientists like Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT. He concluded that: 1) “The data currently represented as “consensus,” even if correct, do not imply alarm. … “alarm” is the aim rather than the result,” and (2) “The scientific community is committed to the maintenance of the notion that alarm may be warranted. Alarm is felt to be essential to the maintenance of funding. The argument is no longer over whether the models are correct (they are not), but rather whether their results are at all possible. One can rarely prove something to be impossible.”

How many people are you willing to see starve because you bought “An Inconvenient Truth,” a propaganda film, hook, line and sinker?

Paul VanGinhoven