Summit County Citizens Voice

Ill-timed Earth Day letter on climate change debunked

Global March temperature anomalies.

*Editor’s note: This op-ed was written in response to letters to the editor in the Summit Daily News, published in Frisco, Colorado. The newspaper frequently publishes letters by Hertzberg that are full of scientific inaccuracies and misleading statements.

By Howard Hallman and Brad Piehl

Sunday was April 22 was Earth Day. The Summit Daily celebrated by printing a full page feature spread about climate change denier Marty Hertzberg. Marty has anointed himself as a climate change expert, but in fact he spent much of this career doing mine safety work for the coal industry. Given his background and apparent lack of research experience it is hard to see him as a fair minded credible expert on global warming.

Much of what Marty states as fact is naïve and untrue. The earth’s temperature has increased dramatically over the past 50 years, by all reasonable accounts the direct result of rapid population growth and a significant increase in carbon dioxide emissions into Earth’s atmosphere.

Contrary to Marty’s assertion, small increases in any number of substances including carbon dioxide and fluorocarbon derivatives do have a large and long-term impact on weather. In fact, that’s how cloud seeding works; a relatively tiny quantity of substance is blown into the air triggering the formation of ice crystals and subsequent snowfall.

The global warming controversy in the United States is not really a public policy discussion; rather it is one more political straw man for those who seek to generate hate and divide us.  (more…)