The Maui News published a disturbing letter (July 23) from a writer advocating burning more fossil fuels. I first read it hoping it was a joke letter but there was no punch line.

Global warming science is based on carefully collected data from many different fields, including the ice core histories from Greenland and Antarctica. Humans are presently releasing 2.4 million pounds per second of fossil fuel-based carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Do that long enough and it will change atmospheric and oceanic chemistry.

The letter writer worries about too little CO2 in the ocean. In reality, as the oceans absorb atmospheric CO2, the pH of all oceans is going down. As the pH goes down, the calcium carbonate rigid structures of the marine creatures the writer mentions will not form, and that will be catastrophic. Too much CO2 is the problem, not too little.

I spent much of my career in chemical oceanography so I take his out-of-date reasoning personally. If people are interested in the science of global warming, Google Nova’s excellent program called “Decoding the Weather Machine.” It’s two hours but well worth it.

John Andrews

Haiku