Letters | We could stop an ice age

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I occasionally appreciate Paul Danish’s contrarian views, but sometimes they need to be answered — especially when the issue is something as important as climate breakdown.

In “Have we accidentally prevented another ice age?” (Danish Plan, March 21), he supports global warming as preferable to another ice age, but, not being a climatologist, he doesn’t understand that they are not alternatives. As James Hansen, one of the world’s most respected climate scientists, points out in his book Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and our Last Chance to Save Humanity (2009): “Even though we sometimes hear geoscientists talk as if ice ages will occur again, it won’t happen — unless humans go extinct. Forces instigating ice ages, as we shall see, are so small and slow that a single chlorofluorocarbon factory would be more than sufficient to overcome any natural tendency toward an ice age. Ice sheets will not descend over North America and Europe again as long as we are around to stop them.” [pp. 36-37]

The challenge we must address is how to avoid runaway global warming, not how to prevent another ice age.

David R. Loy/Boulder

Magpuls out

Before getting too snarky about Magpul (“Get Out, Guns Blazing,” ICUMI, March 21) and swooning over our noble state legislature, bear in mind that Democrats offered to give Magpul a loophole: They’d allow the manufacture of high-capacity magazines here in Colorado, as long as they were sold out of state. Not just out of the country, or to law enforcement and military customers, but simply out of state.

Doesn’t sound so principled that way, does it?

Gun rights advocates claim that background checks for private purchases can’t be enforced because shady sellers would simply cross the Wyoming border and do the deal in the first parking lot they find. Who knew that Colorado state Democrats would suggest Magpul do essentially the same thing?

David Rea/Boulder

Expose truth on UFOs too

Joel Dyer’s recent article “Not-sosunny days” (cover story, March 14) drives home some good points about the need for transparency at local, state and federal levels. His assertion that “Our national security apparatus is out of control, but the critical information that would prove to what extent it is being illegally kept from the public,” caught my eye. There is one topic around which, over the last 70 years, the military-industrial-intelligence-complex has built an impenetrable barrier of secrecy: The existence of UFOs and the identity, as best they know, of those operating them.

Now that the obligatory eye rolls and comments about little green men and rectal probes are over, let’s move forward. Though he started out researching Cold War politics, Richard Dolan, an Oxford student and Rhodes scholar finalist, detoured into Ufology 20 years ago. He did so because, while sorting through Soviet-era military reports, he encountered voluminous evidence that UFOs were real and taken very seriously by the Soviets.

Dolan is now two-thirds through writing his three-part book series UFOs and the National Security State, considered by many to be the most definitive survey of the UFO phenomenon of the last 70 years. He and co-writer Bryce Zabel also recently wrote A.D. After Disclosure. It is a courageous attempt to envision how human civilization will be altered once the fact of the UFO/ET presence can no longer be denied by the powers that be.

If you’re convinced the UFO topic is hogwash, then read Dolan’s books or watch the documentary The Day Before Disclosure on YouTube or check out the testimonials gathered by Steven Greer on his Disclosure Project website.

Be they good, bad or indifferent, the ETs are here. Humanity’s ongoing interface with them is the greatest story never told. That the well of information about this topic has been poisoned with disinformation, cover-ups and lies doesn’t mean the charade can go on indefinitely. As citizens it is necessary we become informed and push for disclosure now!

Tim Gale/Boulder

The fox shouldn’t be guarding the hen house

It’s spring here on my small Boulder County farm, and for my family, that means baby chicks, among other things. Each year we raise a couple dozen chicks as a 4-H project for my own and other local kids. It’s a great way for the kids to learn about caring for an animal that eventually provides a healthy food product, and they also get a chance to earn a few bucks when they sell the mature birds at the Boulder County Fair in August.

One afternoon, my daughter went out to feed the 24 chickens and discovered that 11 were dead and five were missing. Off in the distance, we saw a little red fox with one of the birds clenched in its jaw. It was a bad day, to say the least.

We figured out that the fox had dug a hole under our sturdy fence to get into the chicken run. Now, imagine if we had consulted the fox to ask him how we should fix the problem? Do you think he would have had a vested interest in finding a real solution? Doubtful. Yet this is just what we’re expecting the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC) to do when it comes to regulating fracking and protecting our health and safety. As a state agency, the COGCC currently holds a dual mandate: (1) to promote oil and gas development and (2) to regulate oil and gas development. Hmmm, sounds like the fox guarding the hen house to me!

Fortunately, Rep. Mike Foote is sponsoring a bill (HB 1269) to end this dual mandate and limit COGCC to the mission of protecting the environment and human health. This makes perfect sense to me. Why should we be using taxpayer dollars to promote the wealthiest industry in the world?

While this bill by no means solves the numerous issues regarding health and safety that fracking creates, it’s an important first step. Please call Mike Foote and thank him, and then call your own state representatives and senators and encourage them to support this bill (you can find your reps’ contact info at www.VoteSmart.org).

It’s time to stop allowing the foxes at COGCC to guard our own houses, playgrounds, farmyards and waterways.

Kate Johnson/Longmont

Property permanence

I wonder how many judicial decisions (and opinions) have been rendered that are now obsolete, thanks to new technology, practices, customs or mores. People and their values change, as do needs. And property is not really all that “permanent.”

For example, try to consider how many property owners gave any thought to uranium when they sold their ranch and reserved all or some part of the mineral estate, especially if the transaction occurred before the Curies used some pitchblende from Gilpin County for their experiments. In all probability none of those owners could imagine uranium at the time! Then ask about the discovery that nuclear radiation can actually be bad for one (as discovered the hard way by chemist Henri de Becquerel). Me, I’d like to anticipate and prevent problems.

Similarly, maybe — just maybe — landowners who severed a mineral estate from a surface estate prior to 1949 (or maybe even later) could have contemplated hydraulic fracturing as a production method for oil and gas. If a particular mineral’s rendering is uneconomic at this time or that, has it value? And if a method of “enjoyment” has not even been invented yet, how can a property owner be deemed to have willfully “reserved” it? I know, I know; if I own property I own everything it can do for me. Or to me. So I’ll hedge my bets.

But I’ll wager that none of these land sellers thought there was anything in that shale beneath their feet, assuming they even knew there was shale. Or that they would know a chunk of shale if it broke their window.

Something to ponder, especially if you work in the state Capitol.

Gregory Iwan/Longmont