LETTERS: LAGELS SIMPLY MUDDY THE ARGUMENT

To the editor:

Alan Journet's arguments against my position in my last letter are basically flawed. For starters, he takes offense with my using labels like "liberal" and "leftist." He says my position is weak because I used those terms, but in the same letter he dismissed my views as dogmatic. Excuse me, but isn't the word "dogmatic" a label? This is a classic example of muddying the waters by those who do not have any facts to back them up, because the argument for global warming is a lot of hot air. Journet's position could be considered dogmatic. Isn't it the dogma of radical environmentalism?

Journet states that Mr. Rathburn and I are in denial. How can we be in denial of something that doesn't exist? Am I also in denial because I don't believe in the bogeyman? I say Journet is in denial. He never answered any of my questions on the warming that occurred in the past. Is he afraid of the answers because they might go against what he believes?

The statement that I said all I will ever need to know I learned in the second grade was a twisting of what I meant. I know the basic facts of science don't change as I grow older. Journet insinuates that the basic scientific facts are subject to change. Does this mean that if I take his class I will discover that 2 and 2 are 5 and the earth is really flat?

His statement that I consider everyone I disagree with an educated fool is untrue. I have had disagreements with others in the past, but I never considered them fools because they were arguing for something that really existed, and they had evidence and some facts to back their position. Journet stated that global warming is not a fact. If so, then why do all of us have to change our behavior? Those of us from the commonsense side of the tracks have a saying: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Journet's attack on Mr. Rathburn's position that science has lost its credibility is flawed. The past if chock full of examples where science was not credible. In the 1890s scientists were claiming that man would never develop powered flight. In the early 1900s they said the human voice would never be able to travel over radio waves. In 1945 some of the scientists at Los Alamos were opposed to the first atomic bomb detonation because they thought it would chain react with the earth and set the whole planet off like a bomb.

Neither Mr. Rathburn nor I are in denial just because we don't believe every Chicken Little running around screaming, "The sky is falling." In fact, I say our position is quite lucid.

LEONARD M. WILLE

Jackson