Climate change is complex issue

To the editor:Columnist John Tierney, via sarcasm, distortion, and simplistic argument, promotes the climate-change skeptics' campaign of distortion and denial. Sarcasm and distortion are entertaining but do not constitute argument.

While appearing effective, oversimplifying issues appeals only to individuals who fail to understand issues and just reject when confronted with complexity they do not comprehend.

Tierney's argument that 2007 should have been warmer than 2006 implies that climate change argues each year will be warmer than the one before. But it argues no such thing -- merely that there is a trend. One day's rise in the Dow Jones would not lead economists to question the overall current downward trend.

Tierney's discovery that regions of Antarctica have exhibited short-term cooling is well-known to climate scientists.

Ignored by Tierney is the inconvenient evidence that, though data are sparse, over a longer period there is slight warming.

That climate change has varied, and will continue to vary, among regions is well-known -- even to the extent that some regions have shown and may show future slight short-term cooling.

This comprises a challenge neither to the vast wealth of evidence indicating global warming nor to the predictions of a future pattern of catastrophic global increase unless we all take the problem seriously and address it individually and collectively.

With qualifications in American studies -- but not in science, much less climate science -- Tierney serves a political agenda that requires there be no climate change. Regrettably, the evidence indicates he is wrong.

ALAN JOURNET, Cape Girardeau