It's time the Concord Monitor started exercising editorial responsibility and stopped publishing letters which are misinformed, scientifically incorrect and dangerously misleading to the public.

Bruce Cobb's April 23 letter, "Dangerous bill," published ironically the day after Earth Day, contains many statements that are simply wrong. He states that "the current fear of CO2, or carbon is completely foolish and based on unsound science." If you Google "effect of CO2 on climate change," you will get about 10,900,000 "hits" - many of which lead to scientific papers and books documenting the direct effect CO2 has on increasing atmospheric temperature.

The work of Dr. Paul Mayewski at the University of Maine, who has spent his career drilling ice cores in the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps and analyzing samples of air going back as much as 800,000 years, shows that current levels of atmospheric pollution are the highest ever. Thousands of scientific studies around the world over the past 50 years and more have proven the direct relationship between atmospheric pollutants, including human-produced CO2 and other sources of carbon, and warming of the atmosphere leading to climate change.

There is no longer a serious debate in the scientific community about this issue, except how to take corrective action and begin a transition to other means of generating energy, benign and renewable.

PAUL HAGUE

Weare