Dear Aleta Wiley, et al: Help!
Re your statement: "Although this pattern may be attributable to long-term cycles in global temperatures and atmospheric CO2, data sets examining climate phenomena at multi-millennial time scales (e.g., the Lake Vostok data) clearly demonstrate that current trends are far out of range of cyclic change alone. The accumulation of such data has led the United National Environment Programme's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to the unavoidable conclusion: human activity has brought about unprecedented rates of temperature increase on a global scale through release of greenhouse gases primarily associated with combustion of fossil fuels." Could you provide links to the data sources? It is essential that those of us who wish to effectively counter criticism of the conclusion stated above have a solid and complete train of evidence from the conclusion back to the origins and modifications of the data supporting it. Not all of us are as fully informed as you and your colleagues are, and many of us cannot attend the meetings. To convince skeptics (disregarding ideological "deniers"), the fog factor has to be minimal to non-existent as well. And of course, plain-language and straightforward sets of numbers are critical to communicating with non-experts such as politicians. As the pivotal experts in this area, your assistance is urgently needed well in advance of the meetings if we are to be well-prepared in advance. I presume that these data are readily at hand, and trust that they will not require special efforts to convey to this list of thousands of ecologists. Perhaps you and your colleagues have published a persuasive examination of the data and have already set forth a reasoned pathway to your conclusions that those of us less well-informed can use to persuade the doubtful or those who may be perplexed, even upon reading the Panel's report. (It appears that few ecologists have read and fully understood the report, not to mention governmental staff who are required to "understand" mountains of technical material and have been known to "fake it" one way or the other.) As you are no doubt aware, there are mountains of "proof" to the contrary that doubters and deniers can seize upon, thus tipping the political scales against the global warming hypothesis. Thanks, WT
