Global warming separate from Kyoto pact

I have found the editorials in The Northern Miner on global warming over the past year or so to be objectionable. I sense a failure to separate the issue of global warming and its causes, on the one hand, from the Kyoto Protocol, the world’s political response to global warming, on the other.

Regarding global warming, there has been an increasing tone of certainty from numerous reputable, conservative scientific bodies that human activities are the most likely cause of the rise in the earth’s mean surface temperatures. The most recent body to reach this conclusion is the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, whose conclusions are not very different from those of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which was criticized heavily in The Northern Miner’s editorials earlier this year. So I ask myself, whose opinion is more trustworthy? The National Academy of Sciences and other similarly reputable scientific bodies, or the editorial board of a mining publication, who, for some reason, go to great lengths to discredit these studies.

The merits and demerits of the Kyoto Protocol are a separate and obviously vitally important issue that deserves debate — but let’s not have this debate blur the issue of recent global warming and its very probable human causes.

Prof. David Pattison

Dept. of Geology and Geophysics

University of Calgary