New Times / Letters to the Editor

Go back to school, Matt

Stephen Mattson - Los Osos

Matt Kokkonen’s semiliterate and facile interpretation of a few snippets of neighborhood temperature data as proof that “The foundation for the claim for man-made global warming … is fallacious” reveals the workings of a mind both uninformed and partisan (“Bad data underlie global warming claim,” Jan. 21). Among the items on a long list of phenomena one would need to account for prior to arriving at such a conclusion are these critical and well-documented planetary changes:

1. Worldwide increases in average yearly temperature on every
continent

2. Measurable and incremental
increases in sea levels

3. Measurable and incremental increases in the acidity in all major bodies of water, most disturbingly in all seas and oceans

4. Significant year-to-year decreases in most glacial masses

5. The rapid degradation of polar ice

Any explanation would of course need to take into account the massive and universal output of greenhouse gases from strictly human activity and the yearly rise in the total global volume of such gasses. But such intellectual due-diligence is clearly beyond the capacity of Kokkonen who, like his zombie cohorts, prefers to let the unnatural take its course.

Presumably the qualifications for a California Assemblyman do not include clear thinking, willingness to do research, honest evaluation of all evidence before decisions are taken, or even the ability to organize a short essay at a 10th-grade level. Well, darn it anyway, he’s free to run for whatever office he chooses. I just hope to hell the voters are smarter than he is—and that whoever beats him is a little more honest and, just maybe a little brighter.

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Sound data substantiate global warming claim

Penny Lancaster - San Luis Obispo

Not all data relating to climate change may be as dubious as those presented in Matt Kokkonen’s commentary (“Bad data underlie global warming claim,” Jan. 21). Consider the Keeling curve, for example. In 1958, Charles David Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography began collecting atmospheric CO₂ data at the Mauna Loa Observatory on the top of a mountain in Hawaii. The reason this site was chosen was because of its isolation, in some of the purest air on the planet. Unlike the local sampling sites Kokkonen cited, Mauna Loa is far from civilization, industry, thermal masses, automobile exhaust; any human activity that could possibly skew local CO₂ levels. The data collected there over the past 52 years is known as the Keeling curve, and is one of the oldest and most widely accepted figures produced on climate change. How can this be bad data?

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Kokkonen's clinging to Palin's skirt

Steve Ela - Paso Robles

I was mildly surprised New Times would serve up Matt Kokkonen’s stale, half-baked “commentary” denying global warming (“Bad data underlie global warming claim,” Jan. 21) after it had been published and refuted in two other local media earlier in the month.

Perennial losing GOP candidate Kokkonen appears to be trying a new way to set himself apart from the other candidates in the GOP primary for the Assembly seat being vacated by Sam Blakeslee: become a know-nothing denier clinging to famous denier Sarah Palin’s skirt.

For those who would like facts, not blather, on anthropogenic global warming, I suggest they attend the meeting regarding climate change at 7 p.m. on Feb. 10 at the Atascadero Lake Pavilion.

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Reform or expire

Ken Highfill - Cayucos

My Republican friends who think climate change is not being caused by human activities (“Bad data underlie global warming claim,” Jan. 21) should consider why major metropolitan areas have spare-the-air days. It’s because such results of human activity as vehicle emissions, power-plant emissions, and agricultural emissions foul the air to the point it is harmful to our health. 

 Tens of thousands of people die every year because of cancers and respiratory ailments caused by air pollutants. Burning anything—cigarettes, wood, coal, peat, oil, or gas—produces harmful toxins. If we don’t clean up our planet, we could join the extinct species.

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Consider the consequences

Doug Bates - Paso Robles

I have been thinking about the debate in this country over climate change. Considering both sides, I come back to one basic question: what if they’re wrong?

On one side of the debate, I hear arguments that measures to adjust for climate change require huge investments at a time our economy is in trouble, we’re searching for new sciences that are not there yet, and the efforts would be a big waste of time because the problem is concocted. On the other side, I hear advocated getting rid of non-renewable energy even at a huge cost, energy bills should be increased to pay for the changes, and implementing green energy sources, even though they aren’t ready to take over for coal and oil. What would be the worst outcome if each side is wrong?

1. If we go the green way, we would suffer for several years while shifting our job base and developing alternatives to reduce coal and gas use, at the end of which we would leave a cleaner future to our children, and a planet that can recover from its ills.

2. If we ignore climate change and it is real, we devastate the planet; ocean levels rise (Miami, Los Angeles, Houston, New Orleans, to name a few, under water), and we place a huge burden on our children to clean up our mess.

Everyone with a strong opinion should ask: What if I’m wrong?

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Don't drill, conserve

Andrew Christie, Director - San Luis Obispo

Stop the presses: Oil has been leaking out of fissures in the ocean floor (“Resume drilling,” Jan. 28) for thousands of years! The drill-baby-drill fan club loves to cite the stats for oil seeps (250 barrels a day in the Santa Barbara Channel! An Exxon Valdez every six months in the Gulf of Mexico!), based, it would seem, on this logic: Look at messy old Mother Earth. We should go out and get that offshore oil because, heck, we’d be much tidier than that.

 If it occurs to you, as it obviously never occurs to them, to scratch your head and ask, “So where are all the dead seabirds and devastated fisheries from all these terrible seeps?” good for you. There is no comparison between a natural seep—which forms a harmless slick a hundredth of a millimeter thick on top of the water, broken up by bacteria and wave action—and an oil spill. Some of the oil from a seep might make it to a beach in the form of tar balls, which are annoying to scrub off if you step on them barefoot.

As primary season draws near and the usual oil-covered candidates crank up the drilling rhetoric, one might politely point out to them that a better way of addressing the issue would be through energy efficiency measures and a national Renewable Portfolio Standard mandating that a greater percentage of our energy come from clean renewable sources, as these will significantly reduce demand for hydrocarbon fuels. One might mention to them that the devastating environmental impacts of offshore drilling even before the arrival of the inevitable spill (among them, seismic surveys, dart core sampling, drilling muds, nitrogen oxides, an industrialized coastline) should be left off the menu if we want a future for our fishing and tourism industries.

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Water deal clears the way for developers

Terry Mohan - San Luis Obispo

Robert McDonald was right on in his reference to the movie Chinatown in his story about the unnecessary overabundance of water coming to SLO town (“How dry we’re not,” Jan. 21). Approval of the Nacimiento pipeline was a cleverly manipulated strategy among county and city politicians and pro-growth business entities. Though I explained to our representatives the same facts McDonald reported when the charges were being passed on to the citizens of SLO, to give them an opportunity to act, they instead reacted like Chicken Little, referencing the hundred-year anomaly of the drought of the early 1990s. Now the last obstacle to the aforementioned conspirators is Measure P.

Measure P states any additional water acquired by the city (by tax or rate increases) should be considered a “reliability reserve.” The reason it was worded that way is voters who passed the measure did not want to pay for new development. To circumvent the legal requirement that the amendment could be changed only by voter approval, the city management and council decided to change the meaning of “reliability reserve” before the amendment was approved. Not surprisingly, no one challenged this rewrite, which now will go to the Planning Commission for the “citizen commission stamp of approval.” With virtually no community participation and disinterest by current residents in maintaining our quality of life, this desecration of democracy will continue, unless Robert McDonald wants to play J. J. Gittes.

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Worry about gangs, not medicine, Nipomo

George Jackson - Atascadero

The Nipomo City Council should be more worried about gangs from L.A. that have invaded than someone from L.A. who wants to bring relief to the infirm through a pot dispensary. Living on the Central Coast for the last 30 years has shown me Santa Maria and Nipomo are crime magnets, period; marijuana dispensary or not.

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The law should not disadvantage gay partners

Rebeka Levin - San Luis Obispo

I am tired of hearing how gay marriage threatens family life (studies show only a third of families live the two-parent mom/dad model anymore), or how it has “always been this way” (read your damn Bible and early history, already). I am equally tired of seeing LGBT groups fruitlessly bang their heads against a wall trying to get people with set religious beliefs—arguably the hardest defense to break—to see their opposition is “just not fair.” Will both sides please stop with the opinions and actually focus on facts?

Marriage is a legal institution in which the state and federal government provide tax, property, and Social Security benefits. Several legal rights and protections are guaranteed to spouses under federal law that are not guaranteed to domestic partners, even under the best state laws. Therefore, some individuals have more legal rights than others, and that is unconstitutional in my view. If marriage is a cultural thing, great: Disconnect it from government; we’ll switch to civil unions and it can go back to being a matter of opinion. Until then, it should be a legal benefit for every U.S. citizen. So let’s get to the point, shall we, and stop the pointless bickering. 

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