Letters

To the Editor:

In the Fall 2016 Academic Questions (vol. 29, no. 3), Peter Wood’s “Books, Articles, and Items of Academic Interest” includes a section entitled “Sustainability.” In it, he references an article from the Sciencewebsite: “Earth’s climate may not warm as quickly as expected, suggest new cloud studies.” The authors of this article suggest that Earth was perhaps cloudier in the past than originally thought, which in turn implies that the cooling effect of clouds―which reflect sunlight back into space―is not so different now than it was then. The upshot is that global warming may not be as sensitive to rising carbon dioxide levels as usually believed. Wood’s conclusion: “the ‘consensus’ climate models have wildly inflated possible global warming resulting from man-made pollution.” In the last paragraph of the article itself, Urs Baltensperger (one of the authors of