To the Editor:

This Father’s day when I stepped outside, I ran into a wall of heat and thought this must be global warming. However, I remembered back to the blizzard we had in April when the global warming deniers felt that global warming is surely a hoax. Should we believe the 97 percent of climate scientists who all agree that global warming is real and caused by human activity or should we step outside and believe the evidence of our own eyes?

I googled measuring global temperature and was I impressed with the painstaking amount of data used. Scientists combine data from land stations, from ships and buoys at sea, and from satellites measuring the atmosphere above the earth. There are over 20,000 land stations and four separate agencies taking measurements. Two of the data compilers are US and two foreign. In the US, one of the reports comes from NASA and the other from NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration).

The others are reported and collected by the Japan Meteorological Agency and the UK Met Office. Their measurements differ slightly but all four scientific agencies agree that the earth has been warming for the past 130 years and this warming has accelerated dramatically since 1980.

I learned that climate measurement is way more complicated than I ever imagined and there are three countries all taking their own measurements with each reporting to us the same findings. Maybe it’s time to rely on their expertise.

Leigh Allgaier
Stevens Point