This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

S. Fred Singer, PhD
The Science and Environmental Policy Project Fairfax, Va

JAMA. 1996;276(5):373.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.

—Readers of JAMA deserve a balanced account on whether global warming (because of increases in greenhouse gases) will be good or bad for human health. The article by Dr Patz and colleagues¹ fails to do this.

First, dealing with climate science, the article presents ice core data of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and temperature for the last 180 000 years (Figure 1) and notes the close correlation, implying that past increases of CO₂ have led to strong warming and that the current increase will do the same. This is misleading. Readers should be warned that the compressed time scale (100000 years per inch) cannot show the cases where temperature increases preceded the CO₂ increases. Nevertheless, one can discern a CO₂ increase 125 000 years ago associated with a drop in temperature.

Figure 1 in the article shows a dramatic (projected) doubling of CO₂, but the . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?