Letters to the Editor
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Paglia a third-rate lightweight
Why does Salon offer a forum to such a third-rate “columnist” like Camille Paglia? A first-rate journalist like Joe Conason must be embarrassed to share the same space with this loudmouth. Paglia puts herself forward as some kind of iconoclast – but she is too lazy to come anywhere close to pulling it off. She airily dismisses global warming without any serious refutation of the case Gore puts forward in “An Inconvenient Truth”:
“Climate change, keyed to solar cycles, is built into Earth's system. Cooling and warming will go on forever. Slowly rising sea levels will at some point doubtless flood lower Manhattan and seaside houses everywhere from Cape Cod to Florida -- as happened to Native American encampments on those very shores. Human habitation is always fragile and provisional. People will migrate for the hills, as they have always done.”
Oh really? Has Paglia read the evidence? In the past 50 years, atmospheric CO2 concentration has broken out of a range over which it has varied for 600,000 years. Furthermore, the rate of increase in CO2 concentration increase over the past 50 years is 100 times greater than the fastest rate of increase that occurred over the previous 600,000 years.
“I was snorting with disgust at its manipulations and distortions…”
All right then, let’s see your publications on the evidence, Camille! Surely your college geology course equipped you to take on the scientific establishment. Write a letter to Science and tell the editors what you think of the paper published there on CO2 concentrations and presented, quite accurately, in Gore’s movie: SCIENCE, Vol. 310, 2005, p. 1313.