Editor:

I was heartened when I read about a recent number of polls that show voters have been turning away from the theory of human-caused climate change.

I would like to think that one reason for the turnaround is because people are becoming more educated on the fallacy of the theory. If it's just because certain powers are going to use that theory to tax us into oblivion (oops, too late), that's OK too.

The matter of excessive taxation is only one of my motivations to try to keep alive a slightly counter theory to the anthropogenic global warming theory. What's being done to our sovereignty in Copenhagen is another major concern. As always I would like to hear from anyone with views agreeing or disagreeing: skeptic@alluretech.net.

I hope some will take note of my many uses of the word "theory" as many think it's a settled science. To those I would ask if there is any other science that, in its infancy, was settled by consensus (a false one at that). I say "infancy" because climate science, although studied by many for centuries, did not come into its own until about the 1980s. That kind of confuses me since the idea of greenhouse gases was first postulated by Joseph Fourier in 1824. The theory that CO2 might be a factor was studied by Svante Arrhenius in 1896. By the way, Svante Arrhenius won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1903. I'm pretty sure he won it for more than just being able to spell CO2 (or "peace" for that matter). But I digress.

Why did it take almost eight decades for climate research to be taken seriously? Maybe it was confusion. Consider this, in 1895 the New York Times reported that "geologists think the world may be frozen up again," in the late 1920s the NYT warned us that the earth is steadily growing warmer, in 1954 Fortune Magazine reported "Climate -- The Heat May Be Off," and in 1975 the NYT talked about "a major cooling widely considered to be inevitable." And lastly in 1981, the NYT quoted scientists warning of a warming "of almost unprecedented magnitude." The NYT is most certainly the paper of record. But then, no one buys records anymore either.

One last thought for those that will berate me shortly. When you do your research try reading something that starts with an "abstract" as opposed to "www."

PAUL J. VAN HISE, Evansville