To the Editor:
Not so cool, Andrew Engelman (May 25, “Cool reaction to climate report”), to spread your own misread of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report — if you did indeed read it — or worse, to pretend that you have read it, and offer an inverted perversion of the work that all nations on the planet, including ours, have done to attempt to save us from ourselves.
There is a small group of paid consultants whose job it is to cast doubt on the science and mock those who would attempt to remedy the vast destruction caused by excess of use and generational failure. The news is not good. While there has been a leveling of carbon emissions in some areas, the overall trend of all greenhouse gases is upward, particularly in the case of methane from many sources, including and especially the fracking boom of the past decade and a half through massive leaks and offgassing leaking pipes, and the fact that cement seals of natural gas wells leak freely.
For our enlightenment and without malice or a craven desire to mislead or baby anyone, I offer below a link to the policymaker’s version of the IPCC report. I forgive you the meanness in the spirit of your letter, the mocking tone and the plain bald misstatements which appear to mock the intelligence, credibility, and ethics of those who are attempting to understand what is happening to our planet, the species and system that it supports, and the observable, measurable destruction we are witness too. I want your children and your grandchildren to live in an abundant, verdant, and diverse world. I attribute the note to either a misreading or reading of one of the false reports created by the merchants of doubt.
Please see the IPCC report. It offers hope under certain conditions, conditions which the world is finally agreeing to attempt. Andrew Engelman is not using the IPCC. See the report he believes he is quoting at ipcc.ch/index.htm, or the executive summary.
Jonah Maidoff
Chilmark
