Letter: Peer review is crucial to climate change answers

Editor,

Regarding, “There are plenty of answers for climate change question” from June 28, I’d like to add a few more sources for solid, science-based climate change information.

For beginners, probably the best website is “What We Know” from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which publishes one of the world’s most highly cited, peer-reviewed science journals, “Science” and Scientific American. NASA/NOAA, National Geographic and Smithsonian feature good climate science articles online. Peer-reviewed data is the key.

Another good site for those confused by all the climate denial fabricated by the fossil fuel industry’s clandestinely funded $2 billion climate denial propaganda machine is skepticalsciemce.org. It’s an interactive site run by volunteer climate scientists where you can get all your questions answered by the real experts in a way you can understand.

The fossil fuel industry’s business model depends on climate denial. They have trillions at stake, so they’re spending billions on climate denial (Scientific American). Big Tobacco did the same thing back in the day, hiring fake “doctors” to deny that smoking causes lung cancer.

Now this nation’s biggest oil and coal corporations’ deniers-for-hire are “scientists.” There isn’t a professional climate denier who isn’t paid under the table by fossil fuel corporations (ucsusa.org “Climate Deception Dossiers”).

Fronts like The Heartland Institute are at the heart of this cynical operation. Heartland actually used to launder the money for the tobacco corporations, now they do it for fossil fuel corporations, funneling the money from them to their fake climate “experts” (Merchants of Doubt, desmogblog.org).

Lynn Goldfarb

Denver