Resident challenges climate change article's validity

In Lee Santa’s last letter he made a number of false statements, but the one I want to address here is his comment regarding an article called “The Weather Amplifier” in the March issue of Scientific American. Santa refers to the article as “real science.”

The article was written by Michael Mann and was actually more of an opinion piece than a scientific article. In the article, Mann attempts to create an atmosphere of fear and dread, predicting certain doom if we don’t curtail our use of fossil fuels immediately. He calls upon “wave mathematics and quantum mechanics,” claiming that these are all the evidence he needs in order to prove his dire warnings about the future. Absurdly, he claims that he can predict the future of our climate based upon knowledge of the location of electrons over the next 30 years.

But Mann, who claims to have been trained in physics, conveniently ignores Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty, a well-established and well-respected scientific principle and an integral part of quantum mechanics, which states emphatically that it is impossible to know the exact position of an electron at any given moment in time. This principle has never been disproven or even seriously questioned by physicists. Thus, the basic premise of Mann’s article is called into question and his thesis becomes more science fantasy than true science.

So we can accept Lee Santa’s version of “real science,” or we can see it for what it truly is: a political smokescreen.

MONTE HEIL

Sagle