Thank you for printing John Balentine’s Magic 8-Ball column (Here’s Something, Dec. 31). I almost feel like I’m behind it. John, in sync with the smartest man in the world, Donald Trump, asked that, in light of last summer’s record Antarctic cold, “Will climate change proponents finally admit their efforts are nothing but ‘blah, blah, blah?'” Or will they continue to follow their “child leader, Greta Thunberg,” and her coven of necromancers who call themselves climate scientists?

Even Newsmax, that bastion of rationality, seems to have succumbed to this clique of nogoodniks and their black magic. Newsmax reported last October that a scientist at the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling said, “Although Antarctica has had a cold winter this year, over the past few decades the most northerly parts of Antarctica have warmed five times faster than the global average – that’s faster than anywhere else in the Southern Hemisphere.”

Average, shmaverage; a summer heat distribution map clearly shows that the cold is still with us. It just sank to the bottom of the world. Cold air is heavier than hot air. Have you never heard of gravity? It pulls heavy stuff down. Anyway, if a polar vortex or bear were to suck the cold out of the atmosphere through an ozone hole, there is much more where that came from. Space is very cold. We could easily make an anti-ozone hole in the atmosphere and suck some cold back in, and everything would be cool again.

Even if this didn’t work, we are releasing carbon into the atmosphere at probably less than 10 times the rate that natural phenomena did during the end of the Permian era. Not everything died then, and it won’t now. Man came back after less than 252 million years. So be a real American. Don’t worry. Be like John and me. “We’ll be back.”

Ken Weston
Bath