Mr. Berry’s opinion article (Inter Lake, Jan. 6) is one of several he has published in which he attempts to convince the reader that, contrary to the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the vast majority of climate scientists, human activity is not the cause of increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere and oceans. Carl Sagan popularized the aphorism that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Mr. Berry’s claims that the IPCC is a “marketing organization, not a scientific organization,” that the “IPCC and climate alarmists have abandoned the time-tested scientific method,” and that “they [IPCC] exclude evidence that proves their theory is wrong” are indeed extraordinary. So where is his evidence for these claims? The answer is he provides none. In contrast, all IPCC assessment reports are based on results published in recognized, peer-reviewed scientific journals. Further, all IPCC reports have been subjected to extensive peer review by subject matter experts.

Even more remarkable is Mr. Berry’s claim that all that is required to reach his conclusions regarding the IPCC studies is high school physics and math plus a little instruction from Mr. Berry. Mr. Berry has written a paper based on his so-called high school physics model of the global carbon cycle and showed it agreed with observational data. We have carefully reviewed Mr. Berry’s paper and found it contained faulty and inappropriate assumptions, incorrect math and physics, and a complete misunderstanding of what the observational data represents. But most egregious of all his errors was the fact that the physical quantity calculated by his “physic model” (concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere) was different from that represented by the observational data he used to “verify” his model. In simple terms, his model calculates the number of apples in an orchard while the data he used to justify the correctness of his model counts the number of oranges. This is the type of error that would embarrass any freshman physics student.

One of us (Robert Korechoff) met with Mr. Berry last March and pointed out these issues. At that time, he had no explanation regarding the inconsistency between his model (number of apples) and the observational data (number of oranges) and said he would look into the problem. What he did was to ignore these inconvenient errors in his work and submit his paper to a “pay for publication” journal. Contrary to his claims in his opinion article, it is Mr. Berry, not the IPCC, who does not understand the scientific method and has twisted his physics model to produce a result that agrees with his particular political and ideological agenda.

­—Jerry Elwood lives in Kalispell. Robert Korechoff lives in Bigfork