The Climate Change Dust-up

To the Editor: 
Art Hall’s recent comments about climate change drew a couple pithy letters to the Herald’s Jan. 13 edition.
Both addressed the evils of fossil-fuel energy industry lobbying in Washington, but let’s not forget the clamor for government subsidies for alternate energy sources development (recall Solyndra).  Piqued at Hall’s skepticism regarding global warming, which has morphed into climate change, perhaps to allow advocates the opportunity to blame any violent weather phenomenon on carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels.
Advocates often claim the issue is settled science and future of mankind on earth is bleak. Is there such a thing as settled science? If we look at almost any field, astronomy, medicine, physics, or chemistry, we find a history of even long-held notions being vanquished in favor of later, more-informed theories or knowledge. By whatever name, climate change is not settled science.
As far as violent storms and other dramatic weather happenings are concerned, our recorded human history of weather is but a blink in time in the climate history of the earth. I see the current fervor over the imminent calamity of CO2 emissions a bit “the sky is falling,” Chicken Little stuff, with the actual human contribution to emission undefined, with no idea what we can do about it aside from trashing fossil fuels.
There’s severe economic problem with that “solution.” Major industrial economies are energy intensive and depend on affordable, abundant 24/7, 365 availability. In the marketplace, given equal quality of goods and services offered, the lowest cost producer has a competitive advantage.
A big element of cost is energy, to power our electrical devices and run our vehicles. On the electrical front in particular, we must have affordable, round the clock supplies of electricity, which current alternate sources (wind and solar, for example) aren’t prepared to deliver. They will improve as reliable sources and cost-wise too, but we are not there yet. We may never be able to rely on such sources for all of our daily demand for uninterrupted electrical power. But they will find their rightful place in the performance and cost realms of our economy.
The recent approval of the gas pipeline which will allow the B.L. England power plant to convert from coal to natural gas is a good step in the right direction toward reducing emissions and should be applauded, not condemned. From a resource perspective we should find ways to use every source of energy. By scrapping fossil fuels we remove the incentives toward research to improve their emissions performance. I doubt we have expended all the science for cleaning them up. Research is ongoing for capturing carbon dioxide emissions and putting them to some good use. But dumping fossil fuels brings with it economic consequences we won’t want to deal with. With having to bring alternate sources along and integrate them into the mix. But to try to solve the carbon emissions problem (still poorly defined, more speculation than anything) by abandoning fossil fuels when we don’t have a replacement in kind is fraught with economic peril and potentially far more damaging short-term than the ill-defined long-term existential effects of climate change or global warming, if they are real.
What we have is two belief systems knocking heads with believers and deniers (as they are called by believers) at loggerheads where calm, rational thinking is in order to preserve the energy underpinnings of our economic existence. To petroleum haters: Fossil-based products are core to our modern world of synthetic materials. We need wisdom, not geopolitics.