Here’s one rule to take to the bank: never trust any claim made by a climate-change “skeptic.” My other letter here was when conservative commentator John Carlson claimed that the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK stated that global warming had stopped, when in fact its website said the exact opposite.

Now Jim Koubele’s Aug. 18 letter (“Another Look at Climate Change”) tries to claim that ice core drilling in the Antarctic is nothing more than “a normal climate cycle, having nothing to do with CO2.” Now I’m going to do something about this ice core drilling Mr. Koubele conveniently failed to do – cite a scientific source.

The website of the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDAIC), the U.S. Department of Energy’s primary climate-change research center (cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html), says: “The highest pre-industrial value recorded in 800,000 years of ice-core record was 298.6 parts per million by volume (ppmv), in the Vostok core, around 330,000 years ago. Atmospheric CO2 levels have increased markedly in industrial times; measurements in year 2010…indicated values of 386 ppmv, and are currently increasing at about 2 ppmv/year.”

What the Antarctic ice core drilling reveals, in other words, is not a normal cycle at all.

Combatting climate change and its effects won’t be cheap. But as events in Houston are showing, it’s like the old automobile oil filter commercials: you can pay the price now – or pay it later.

– Robert Rosen