Dear Editor,

I would like to respond to the editorial,” Why California is burning as much as it is.”  This is the sixth climate denial piece I’ve read by your visiting editor and I feel that the constant repetition and misuse of terms along with the really bad science needs to be addressed.  In past editorials he mentions the Great Inland Sea and claims that it created the Great Central Valley.  Most references point a query to the Great Inland Sea to the Western Inland Seaway which occurred during the Cretaceous Period, which happened 100 million years ago.  It was a seaway that bisected what is now North America.  California does indeed contain an abundance of fossils deposited when our Central Valley was covered by an inland sea, but this was 15 million years ago.  He claims that man was using fire and on foot at that time.  Man’s ancestors started using fire 350,000 years ago and they weren’t in what is now California, they were in Africa.  The search for this information took 1.13 seconds, 1.15 seconds, and 0.79 seconds respectively.  It wouldn’t have been hard for the author to get his facts straight.  In his current denial he cites his imagination as evidence for his conclusion.  It is easy to come to a wrong conclusion when you don’t use real data.

The editorials by this author keep repeating that climate change has always happened, which it has but his conclusion is based not on anthropocentric warming, which is what is happening now.  I have to ask what is his source for his claim that climate has changed over time?  You see, he accepts the conclusions, based on evidence, from climatologists that climate changes, but rejects their conclusions that it has never happened this fast in the history of the Earth.

In nearly four decades of teaching, I found it easy to sort the essays written off the top of the student’s head at the last minute, compared to the researched, logical essays.  It took me a little over three seconds to fact-check his claims.  The information about accelerated climate change is out there and so is the massive amount of data produced by scientists from around the world.  I realize that he is writing an opinion piece but the opinion should at least be based on logic.  I expect more from professional writers.

— Eric Julien, Turlock