Global Warming

For a front-page article, Brianna Bailey’s article on sea levels (“As sea level rises, unease follows,” Feb. 6) was being way too politically correct when she started the article with “Whether or not climate change is to blame....” She does not dispute that the sea level is rising and neither does anyone else — it is being measured all the time. Some parts of the world are already being flooded. To beg the question of whether climate change is to blame is too P.C. Of course it is to blame!

In the early 1970s, National Geographic printed an article on the effects of smog on the Earth’s temperature using the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa as a model. As I remember the article, that eruption lofted 25 cubic kilometers of pumice soot and ash, which then took two years to be spread throughout the stratosphere by the jet stream. This blocked out some of the sun’s rays, and the overall average temperature of the planet was lowered by 4 degrees. The effect lasted seven years, causing snow storms on the East Coast of the U.S. during summers, and creating general agricultural difficulty worldwide.

JOSEPH N. BELL UC Irvine chemistry professor F. Sherwood Rowland has just added a footnote to the list of achievements that won him a share of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1995 for his research on the depletion of the Earth's ozone layer. Last week, he kept an overflow lay audience at the Newport Beach Public Library auditorium deeply engaged for more than two hours with a highly technical explanation of global warming -- and I was there being educated.

Of all the issues Debbie Cook and Dana Rohrabacher disagree on in their congressional campaigns, perhaps the most stark are their stances on the environment. Democrat Cook, the mayor of Huntington Beach, has earned a reputation as an environmentalist while GOP incumbent Rep. Rohrabacher for years has ridiculed global-warming theories. So it comes as little surprise that Cook recently received a second big environmental endorsement in her campaign. The California League of Conservation Voters announced it is joining the Sierra Club in backing Cook in the election, citing the candidate?

Our youngest daughter graduated from Newport Harbor High School on Thursday and I feel compelled to publicly and profusely thank the education community of the Newport-Mesa Unified School District for the excellent experience our five children have had in the public schools here over the past 22 years. Each school — from Mariners Elementary to Ensign Intermediate to Newport Harbor High — has provided an environment conducive to learning and curriculum that has prepared our children to succeed in challenging college programs.

Occasionally, I read something in this newspaper that keeps itching my psyche until I finally have to scratch it in print. Like a Forum piece by Chuck Cassity that appeared in the Pilot a couple of weeks ago, ostensibly about global warming. I’m forever fascinated by the citizens — especially public figures like Rep. Dana Rohrabacher — who regard global warming as a scam being run on all of us rational people by left-wing scientists with dubious motives. So I always read what they have to say. And I found that Cassity had an interesting new slant on that issue.