Editor,

Recently there have been some letters about whether climate change is real or whether it is man-made. Our commissioner Rick Hannold and Sen. Barbara Bailey both say no to those facts.

For anyone wondering what the truth of the matter is, last night I stumbled into a documentary called “Decoding the Weather Machine.” I feel like I finally understand how climate works:

1. We know that temperatures are increasing rapidly from looking at the record, which we can find in various places, ice cores, etc. All those places match up with each other.

2. We know that CO2, not oxygen or nitrogen, is responsible for the increasing temperatures because some simple experiments done in the 1800s proved it.

3. We know that the levels of CO2 are higher than they’ve been for millions of years because we can find old air bubbles in ice-cores from Antarctica that go back millions of years.

4. We know that our high levels of CO2 are from man-made causes because fossil fuels created millions of years ago have a different kind of carbon than we have today (we know this from looking at the bubbles mentioned above) and we can test for it.

Anyway, I highly recommend the documentary. It explains all these ideas in a clear simple way with lots of animated illustrations. You can find it at www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/decoding-weather-machine.html

Sharon Emerson

Langley