Letters

Cut Him Off
I read Eric Dexheimer's "Fill 'er Up," in the October 2 issue, with great disgust and disdain.

Leroy Lucero's Crossroads Managed Care is reminiscent of the institution and staff in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest--another bunch of self-righteous zealots who justify their cause under the guise of the great "kindness" and "humanity" they are offering to their fellow man, thinking that "if we save one person out of a million, we are forgiven and just." Give me a break. Dragging people out of their homes to justify their beloved detox center sounds more like a satanic cult than a service to humanity. The innocent have no recourse; as the courts have proven, they will protect their own no matter what constitutional rights have been violated.

I guess we should be happy, though, that it is only a detox facility that they are trying to support with millions of taxpayer dollars each year and by maintaining a quota. If the Trinidad police had a new prison facility open in their area, they wouldn't care how many innocent people they put behind bars just to keep their cherished numbers up enough to keep the place open. And Lucero would still be claiming himself a saint who is protecting the common man from himself.

Unfortunately, Colorado law supports these wackos. Personally, I know a few harmless people who decided to stay home and get loaded after having a spat or disagreement with their partner--only to get hauled off to a detox unit where they had fewer rights than if they had been arrested for a serious crime. It's a profitable business, from what I've heard. These "detox" centers often send a hefty $3,000 to $5,000 bill for their services to the person they joyfully incarcerate beyond the bounds of legal limits. It makes me wonder, though, that if they can justify, through their own paranoia, a 0.00 percent alcohol reading as legal grounds to detain someone against his will, then what's to say they won't spot me in my driveway bringing a six-pack home and assess that I am a danger to myself and the friends who might be coming over to share it with me and should be made to disappear from the world for three days or so?

Cal Anton
Denver

Hot Stuff!
I was thoroughly impressed by Steve Jackson's "Global Warning," in the October 9 issue. The issue surrounding global warming is hot, and so was Jackson's command of the baffling contradictions that confound and confuse us. This article points out all the variables and helps to explain why "the jury is still out"; it will help me pull together the discordant ideas that are flung by both sides of the debate from their respective camps. I have my own opinions on the global-warming issue, but as a teacher, I am obligated to deliver to my environmental studies class an important balance. Steve Jackson's article does just that.

Dave Swartz
Fort Collins

Outrageous! Confounded! Nonsense! Poo-poo!
As I sat and read Steve Jackson's "Global Warning," I could feel my temperature rise.

Oh, you think you made me mad? Nope. I was feeling the heat of mass scrutiny. I sent the URL for the article to my team and some other staff here at my government-funded "green" research facility before I read it. Thanks for helping me get my funding cut! Need a good Web/graphic designer?

P.S.: Great story! It was very well-balanced, with the sad exception of the quoted, name-calling proponents. Where do I stand? Climate change is real, but the greatest problem is the industrialization of the forest lands. Talk about a climate change--rainforest to heat island or desert.

Jim Leyshon
via the Internet

Global warning, warming and global change is even more complex than presented. There are more than two sides to the issues.

First, more than 90 percent of the scientists (IPCC and others) who study human effects on climate agree that there is a real effect. Second, global warming itself is not the most serious outcome: sea-level rise, while not relevant to us in Denver, is very relevant to the 30 percent of the population that lives near a coast, and shifts in rainfall patterns (and amounts) affect crops and ecosystems. In not talking to Earth scientists (geologists, geochemists), Jackson missed the close resemblance of the 125,000-year record of atmospheric greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane with the ocean temperature. The very close "tracking" of the variations of temperature with these gases is extremely impressive. (The gases are measured in bubbles trapped in glacier ice.) My point is that the changes in the past temperatures are related to atmospheric greenhouse-gas variations.

Did the gases cause the climate change or did orbital perturbations cause the climate change, which then changed the greenhouse-gas concentrations? The precision of the record (plus or minus a few hundred years) is not good enough to tell us, and the interrelationships (feedbacks) are quite complex. But we know that carbon dioxide has increased by 30 percent and methane by 100 percent in the last hundred years--much faster than they ever did naturally. Are these increased gases forcing the system? We do not know for sure. It is an awesome experiment.