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 The intent of the blog is to record all of our letters to the editor. 

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Natural Climate Cycles and Global Warming by David Rieck

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  Natural Climate Cycles and Global Warming   The question often comes up whether the changes in climate of the last few decades are due to human caused ‘global warming’, or whether they are just part of nature taking its own course.  To help answer this, we need to understand natural climate change.  There are different kinds of climate cycles, with different causes.  The biggest cycles are driven by tilts in in the Earth’s rotation axis and interaction of Earth’s orbit with Jupiter and Saturn. If you want to know more, look up Milankovitch Cycles and dig in. These are the cause of the ice age cycles, and can be considered constant during a human lifetime.          While these astronomical cycles initiate the changes from ice age to temperate and back, they are not the full story.  Carbon dioxide, like all gases, is less soluble in warm water than cold water.  It is also strongly held by permafrost.  The so...
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Renewable Energy Is Not More Expensive Than Fossil Fuels by Katy Grogan

  Renewable Energy Is Not More Expensive Than Fossil Fuels (Published on March 23, 2022 in The Janesville Gazette) In his letter of March 15, Dennis Hopper blamed the Biden administration for high gas and oil prices. Most economists, however, attribute the rise in fuel costs to two factors–pent-up demand from the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine–both beyond a president’s control.  The more egregious assertion in his letter, however, is that renewable energy is a “futuristic alternative still too expensive for mass use.” In fact, renewables often undercut the cheapest fossil fuels on cost. Electricity produced from fossil fuels costs 5-17 cents /kwh, while that produced by solar costs 3-6 cents and is trending downward. The situation with wind is similar; costs are comparable to that of fossil fuels and trending downward. The Montana Environmental Information Center reported in 2021 that the biggest utility in the state is producing electricity from wind at half the...
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Three Ways Global Warming Affects Weather by David Rieck

Three Ways Global Warming Affects Weather When there has been a big storm it is often reported that it was partly due to global warming.  Not everyone understands or believes it.  I will explain the steps in the process, working from things we already know, so that everyone can be sure it is true. Everyone can see that cloudy nights are seasonably warm and clear nights are colder.  This is because heat, as infrared light, scatters off of cloud droplets, and some of it goes back to earth.  Molecules of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases also send heat back, but in a different way.  They absorb the infrared light, and then radiate it back in random directions.  Some goes back to warm the earth and the lower atmosphere.  Since some of the heat is being sent back down, less goes to the upper atmosphere, so it becomes cooler.  This twin effect of greenhouse gases, warming lower atmosphere and cooling upper atmosphere, is the key to understanding...
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