Dear Editor:
I am not a scientist, but rather an unemployed stay-at-home dad. That said I would like to offer some corrections to the letter ‘Renewable is best’ by Holly Booker (Nov 29).
Firstly, Ontario power generation is not “mainly from coal” but nuclear, gas and hydro (85%). Secondly, Germany’s energy production shortfall was not alleviated by “wind and coal” but by importing expensive electricity from nuclear powered France and the Czech Republic. Wind power can’t be ramped up on demand.
Contrary to the catastrophic vision of the Thermogeddon future posited, here is the reality as per the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change AR5: “(There is) low confidence in the frequency and duration of megadroughts (or) a collapse of monsoon circulations”. With respect to ice melt,”(high confidence that it is) exceptionally unlikely that either Greenland or West Antarctic ice sheets will suffer near complete disintegration”
With regards to global warming exasperating famine, more crops are grown now than ever before in human history (thank Norm Borlaug) and the UN reports developing nations per capita food calorie consumption has risen 38% since 1964. Absolute world poverty has declined from 52% to 25% of population since 1981, propelled by the industrializing economies of China, India and Brasil. Hurricanes and tornadoes have shown no increasing trends in energy nor occurrence since accurate records began in the 1940s. As for the “extinction of thousands of species”, not a single one has been caused by man made global warming. The poster child of alarmism, the polar bear, has increased in population by 600% since the 1950’s!
Lastly war. Humanity’s inhumanity reached a high water mark with the Great War and WWII, both occuring before any discernible human influence on climate, which via the IPCC, began in the 1950’s.
None of these things are made worse by climate change. History has already spoken.
Jeff Cormack