I heartily enjoyed Mr. Eller’s political column on the Kyoto Protocol. His unsupported claims and faulty logic greatly amused me. He used the old fallback excuse that “there is not enough known about global warming, therefore we should sit on our hands and do nothing.” He claims that “we” are uncertain if global warming is caused by human activity, but I will give you the facts and let you decide for yourselves.
CO2 is a gas responsible for causing global warming. In the 160,000 years before the Industrial Revolution the levels of global CO2 oscillated slowly between 200 and 300 ppm. In the last 200 years since the Industrial Revolution the level has increased from 280 ppm to 370 ppm. This is from D. Botkin, and E. Keller, environmental science. (Notice how I cited a source unlike Mr. Eller with his highly dubious claim of a $92 trillion tag for the Kyoto Protocol.)
My favorite part of the article, however, was Mr. Eller’s comparison between global warming and eugenics to the holocaust. If Mr. Crichton’s analogy about these two was so strong why didn’t Eller write it? Allow me to retort in similar fashion. Recently, someone made an interesting analogy between Mr. Eller’s theories and a particular practice. This practice was endorsed by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. This practice was slavery; it resulted in the death, displacement and torture of millions and ultimately caused the Civil War.
Andrew Haas
Industrial engineering sophomore