Letters to the editor for Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Story on gun ownership, false, misleading

In the March 10 issue of the Nevada Appeal, you ran a story from AP contributor Emily Swanson that purported to tell the story that fewer Americans are gun owners and hunters. That information is false and misleading.

BATFE statistics show the highest gun ownership in the US since pre-Civil-War-era gun ownership, while hunter registration in many states is higher than it has been in the last 75 years.

This is just another piece of anti-gun journalism and disinformation that has become the norm in mainstream media and unfortunately appears more and more often in our local news. I am happy to forward this story to my local NRA representative for a more eloquent response to its half-truths and lies. I am sure they can point out where Swanson used bad data rather than truly investigating and getting the correct data, which of course does not fit with her agenda.

I enjoy reading the local news through the eyes of the Nevada Appeal. I resist the efforts of the anti-gun lobby and its associated bumbling non-reporters to paint gun owners as irrelevant to modern society. I would like to point out that without the millions of dollars that hunters and shooters pour into the Nevada economy, many state parks would not exist and much wildlife would be on the verge of disappearing because it is the fees that hunters and shooters pay that allow the maintenance and creation of parks and habitats and that helps to maintain wildlife levels at viable levels of existence.

Harry Howard

Washoe Valley

Time to start paying attention to science

In support of his argument that the global warming “ruse” is actually a plot to “destroy the economies of and to reduce the standard of living enjoyed in the industrialized nations,” E.C. Cowan alleges that “the globe hasn’t warmed in 18 years.” Is this true? Let’s have a look.

Dr. Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, explains that “1998 was the warmest year in the last century. There was a big El Niño event in 1997 and 1998, and we have a lot of evidence that there was a lot of heat coming out of the ocean at that time. So that’s the real anomaly — the fact that we had what was perhaps the biggest El Niño event on record.”

Dr. John Abraham, professor of thermal and fluid sciences at the University of St. Thomas, explains the warming paradox this way: “93 percent of the heat goes into the ocean, and the ocean continues to heat, so people are confusing temperature fluctuations in the atmosphere — the weather — with long-term climate change.”

Last June the AP reviewed government weather data and ranked U.S. cities by how much they’d warmed over the past 30 years. Carson City was on top of that list, with average summertime temperatures soaring 6.8 degrees. So, given that we’ve become the climate change capital of America, isn’t it time we dispensed with all the Internet hoaxes about how global warming’s not happening and start paying attention to the actual science?

Rich Dunn

Carson City