As executive director of International Climate Science Coalition, I find it is a mistake for Don and Alona Steinke, in a May 15 letter “Oppose coal terminal,” to make a link between extreme weather and global warming.
This is one of the few areas of accord between the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). In 2012, the IPCC asserted that a relationship between global warming and wildfires, rainfall, storms, hurricanes and other extreme weather events has not been demonstrated. In 2013, the NIPCC concluded the same, saying, “in no case has a convincing relationship been established between warming over the past 100 years and increases in any of these extreme events.”
The National Climate Data Center reveals that state records for extreme weather in Washington are spread throughout the past century, with no recent increase. Here are some of the records:
• Maximum temperature: 118 F in 1928. Minimum temperature: -48 F in 1968.
• Maximum 24-hour precipitation: 14.26 inches in 1986.
• Maximum 24-hour snowfall: 65 inches in 1994.
• Maximum snow depth: 367 inches in 1956.
Yet, on the false premise that there has been a supposed increase in extreme weather events caused by global warming, President Barack Obama wants to end America’s use of coal, your country’s least expensive and more plentiful power source. It is worrisome for us here in Canada and indeed across the free world when our primary defender is bent on crippling itself in this way.
