Talking Point Alert

This letter in the Globe repeats the talking point that Climategate was about a few "minor" errors in thousands of pages of top-notch scientific reporting. Just because, as the letter writer admits, this point has been "stated many times" doesn't make it true.

Science is not a popularity contest
March 15, 2010
IN HIS March 3 op-ed column “Gore still hot on his doomsday rhetoric,’’ Jeff Jacoby ridicules Al Gore for not “backing down’’ as the case for global warming “is melting faster than . . . glaciers.’’ Jacoby needs to get his facts straight.

The errors discovered in a few paragraphs of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports are minor points that in no way undermine the conclusion of the several-thousand-page reports, as stated many times.

Jacoby cites that polls show that a smaller percentage of the public believes that global warming is serious. Science is not a popularity contest. Would the Globe publish a piece that disagrees with other scientific facts, or that claims that Mars is hot and Venus is cold?

The op-ed page is for people to voice their own opinions. They are not entitled to their own facts.

Patrik Jonsson
Somerville