To The Reader’s Forum:

A Post-Journal article April 13 refers to an “unmanageable degree of climate change …” This one-sided piece perpetuates the “sky is falling” mantra.

Such opinion pieces posing as factual are predicated on the notion that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. By conflating carbon dioxide with pollution, energy policies are being mandated that will endanger the reliability and affordability of the electricity so vital to our quality of life, not to mention endangering our civilization.

Energy policies based on non science damage both human prosperity and the natural environment of the Earth. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.

It is an essential trace gas. At .04 percent of the atmosphere, CO2 is the food on which plants depend and the substance of which we are all made. It is the basis of life on earth. More CO2, more plants. Growers pump 1200 ppm into their greenhouses to promote growth — three times the 400 ppm in the air.

Given the animus in today’s media toward scientific skepticism, one wonders how the facts can ever be accessed. “Scientific research involves using the scientific method, which seeks to objectively explain the events of nature in a reproducible way,” Isaac Newton said, showing science by definition is never settled. “It involves formulating hypotheses, via induction, observations, experimental and measurement-based testing of deductions drawn from the hypotheses; and refinement or elimination of the hypotheses based on the experimental findings.”

Scientific research has not proven that variations in climate or in CO2 levels are anything more than natural cycles on this dynamic planet. Policies based on demonizing CO2 put our energy system at risk.

Karen Engstrom

Mayville