I would like to thank George Roof for his letter, “Global warming is the ‘greatest hoax,’” which responded to my earlier letter (“Electric bills are going up a lot, anyway”) about various reasons our electric bills will be going up. I am thanking Roof for his letter because it gives so many examples of wrong answers and that he is not seeing the elephant in the room.
I have been getting free daily email newsletters from the websites insideclimatenews.org and carbonbrief.org in recent years. These websites are media aggregators for many global climate change news outlets. Recently, reports of record-high temperatures of 120-125 degrees have come out of many Asian countries and Europe. It is official that 2023 was, globally, including the USA, the hottest year on record. Record droughts and floodings from abnormal rainfall are expanding. Does Roof get or read or remember any news?
Second, his assertion that global warming is the greatest hoax can be disproven in minutes by anyone who can do an internet search on this keyword string: “Is global warming a hoax.” I did this, and the first dozens of links said it is not a hoax, and they explained why. However, I am also aware of a small number of fringe antiglobal-warming people and organizations that use convoluted rhetoric and misinterpretation to cast doubts. Read the Wikipedia article titled “Climate change denial” and, also, see the website desmog.org for further explanations. An internet search on “PragerU disinfo” will give even further examples of what I would call “disthink.” Further, after living in Delaware for 28 years, it did not escape my notice that we don’t get any snow like we got when my wife and I first came here.
Third, near the end of his letter, Roof said, “In Texas, … snowstorms freeze windmills and shut down sun farms.” This is a big lie. Extreme weather hit Texas in February 2021. It caused hundreds of deaths and $200 billion in damage. At the time, important Texas officials, including Gov. Greg Abbott, were initially quick to blame failures specifically on freezing up of wind farms and solar farms. They were wrong. For a better and more complete story, see the Wikipedia article titled “2021 Texas power crisis.”
Also, at the same time (2021), the media carried reports from Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota and New York that said freezing up of their wind farms or renewable sources never happened in similar bad weather in those states! This proves that wind and solar farms do not all “freeze up.”
Many articles said that the Texas power grid failure was really and primarily caused by grid vulnerabilities to the extreme low temperatures that they got. Some articles said that authorities in Texas were even warned about this many years earlier. A website article in the conservative National Review, titled “Why Texas went dark,” actually did a pretty good job analyzing the Texas grid politics that also contributed to the grid failure.
Fourth, the Daily State News published a letter by Roof on Oct. 9, 2020 (title: “Fossil fuels still needed more than attorney general’s lawsuit suggests”). In that letter, Roof bashed wind turbines and said they would never even pay for themselves (in spite of the widespread known fact that they do pay for themselves). I did my homework on this claim, and using some of the same numbers Roof used, proved him wrong. The Daily State News published my homework Oct. 19, 2020 (title: “Good riddance, fossil fuels”). It included one line of numbers to back up my claim. In Roof’s recent letter (see above), he still bashes wind turbines but no longer says they will never pay for themselves. So, maybe he remembered that I showed that he was wrong about that and just intentionally left that part out this time around, while still bashing wind turbines. I would give him a brownie point for that.
Roof made a number of other statements that really require further correction, revision and clarification, but I would need about triple the space.
Arthur E. Sowers
Harbeson
Reader reactions, pro or con, are welcomed at civiltalk@iniusa.org.
