Climate change very evident

THE EDITOR, Sir: THANKS TO The Sunday Gleaner’s In Focus section for publishing ‘Consensus on climate change’ (September 17, 2017), a powerful essay by Professor A. Anthony Chen in contradiction of columnist Martin Henry’s ‘Hurricanes and climate change’ (September 10, 2017).

The world since the Industrial Revolution has seen an enormous rise in the amount of greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere from fossil fuels.

As an example, think about the many millions of motor vehicles in use on any one day on our planet, and then ask yourself, “Where are these hydrocarbons going?”

UNPLEASANT FACT

I imagine that these gases go into the atmosphere, and then into the oceans. So it stands to reason then that the climate is being negatively impacted by human activities.

Now, some people try to avoid this unpleasant fact by coming up, for instance, with the outlandish notion that HAARP (High Frequency Active Aurol Research Project), a so-called weather modification programme, is being conducted by the US government and its military.

That HAARP, a secret programme that uses lots of radio antennas located in Alaska, injects high-frequency anti-matter particles into the ionosphere. These particles are alleged to change the jet stream, and with this change, hurricanes, floods, and even earthquakes occur.

But such fanciful ideas deflect the blame for global warming away from the fossil-fuel industrialists, and on to some impersonal and imaginary sci-fi force.

Such is the perverseness of some humans that, while they are busily sawing off the limb on which they are sitting, they, at the same time, are denying that there is a limb that they are sawing.

Such people are destined for a great fall.

GEORGE GARWOOD