Letter to the Editor – December 1, 2008

The recent letter to the editor from Dana Leininger regarding renewable energy and climate change gave some false information. She cited an article by Lorne Guntre, an Edmonton journalist and climate change skeptic, who claims as Leininger did that we are in a cooling period, not a warming period, for the Earth. The mistake that Guntre and those he quotes make is to confuse climate with weather. Climate is weather averaged over a time period usually of 30 years. Global temperature typically fluctuates wildly from year to year. Use a web search engine on Lorne Guntre or look at the website greenfyre.wordpress.com/2008/10/21/ to see the debunking of Guntre’s claim as well as climate data and other interesting links. Also check out the Public Interest Research Centre on the web. No, the climate is still warming and is likely to do so for the foreseeable future according to the latest IPCC report unless we make drastic changes in how we produce our energy whether for heat, transportation, light or other uses of electric power. I am a bit puzzled by Leininger’s claim that switching to renewable energy sources for her farm would increase her electric bill by a factor of ten. If this is the case, and I trust her information, it is a vivid example of the need to move from monopoly energy suppliers to distributed production with each user producing the bulk of the energy which that individual uses. That’s another reason for not building the HGS.

Ron Mathsen