A word of advice to climate change contrarians: Check the accuracy of your source material before touting it as evidence against human-caused global warming. In a recent letter (Daily Bee, Dec. 18), Jeremy Conlin plays up a chart that purports to show a poor correlation between atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and temperature changes throughout geological history. He appears to be naïvely unaware that his graphical evidence has been critically evaluated and found to be seriously lacking in scientific rigor. Its relevance is summarized as follows: “… your alleged “evidence” is a graph, in part hand-drawn, posted to a website that hasn’t been updated in six years by an obscure person with no discernible expertise in this area, and based on the work of a scientist who is not an expert in paleo temperature reconstructions and whose ideas were long ago supplanted by better work based on actual physical proxy records.“ (See “Here’s what real science says about the role of CO2 as Earth’s preeminent climatic thermostat” at http://bit.ly/2ENB9MV .)

Those who deny the reality of anthropogenic global warming are in the habit of glomming onto any shred of information that appears to support their viewpoint, showing little concern about whether or not it has been scientifically authenticated. It was not difficult for me to find the rebuttal article I referenced above. One wonders why deniers do not make at least a minimal effort to determine whether their citations are based on validated science or discredited “alternative facts.”

JACK DeBAUN

Sandpoint