Still a controversy
I am glad that Paul Deacon agrees with me that electric cars do not necessarily decrease carbon dioxide emissions (Letter, Oct. 3, page 8). In fact, they increase the emissions if electricity is generated from coal.
The belief in global warming should be respected even though Google has cited 1,370,000 references for “global warming controversy 2010” and 545,000 references for “carbon dioxide global warming myth.” Many of these controversies are scientific, while some political in nature, and exist in many countries.
There are also 101,000 references for “hockey stick graph controversy.” A sharp temperature rise is shown for the last century in a graph of the estimated temperatures over a period of 1,000 years — like a hockey stick. A reference mentions “The Hockey Stick graph — the foundation of global warming theory — has shown to be scientifically invalid, perhaps even a fraud.”
Fox News recently reported that a sharp temperature peak before the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide was shaved off from the hockey stick.
Last winter, many parts of the US experienced record high snowfall and the lowest temperatures in 100 years and this was claimed as part of the global warming phenomena.
Some criticized such a claim as “Heads, I win; tails, you lose.” Global warming is now used interchangeably with climate change.
Achim Steiner, head of the Nairobi-based UN Environment Programme, said that extreme weather this year, such as floods in Pakistan or Russia’s heat wave, was a “stark warning” of the need to act to slow global warming.
I hope he has not “confused local weather events with the global climate,” as Deacon has indicated.
Charles Hong
Columbus, Ohio
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Taipei is facing a severe rat infestation, and the city government is reportedly considering large-scale use of rodenticides as its primary control measure. However, this move could trigger an ecological disaster, including mass deaths of birds of prey. In the past, black kites, relatives of eagles, took more than three decades to return to the skies above the Taipei Basin. Taiwan’s black kite population was nearly wiped out by the combined effects of habitat destruction, pesticides and rodenticides. By 1992, fewer than 200 black kites remained on the island. Fortunately, thanks to more than 30 years of collective effort to preserve their remaining
After Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) met Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Beijing, most headlines referred to her as the leader of the opposition in Taiwan. Is she really, though? Being the chairwoman of the KMT does not automatically translate into being the leader of the opposition in the sense that most foreign readers would understand it. “Leader of the opposition” is a very British term. It applies to the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy, and to some extent, to other democracies. If you look at the UK right now, Conservative Party head Kemi Badenoch is
A Pale View of Hills, a movie released last year, follows the story of a Japanese woman from Nagasaki who moved to Britain in the 1950s with her British husband and daughter from a previous marriage. The daughter was born at a time when memories of the US atomic bombing of Nagasaki during World War II and anxiety over the effects of nuclear radiation still haunted the community. It is a reflection on the legacy of the local and national trauma of the bombing that ended the period of Japanese militarism. A central theme of the movie is the need, at
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