To the editor:

Les Blevins thinks George Bush has turned his back on the war against global warming. I don’t think Mr. Bush can be blamed for this. The current issue of Astronomy, June 2004, has in it an article on contributions that amateur astronomers are making with high-tech equipment. The first amateur astronomer featured in the article is Donald C. Parker of Coral Gables, Fla. He has been observing and getting CCD images of Mars nearly continuously during the last 13 years.

At the top of page 80 is this quotation from the last paragraph dealing with Mr. Parker: “But his most intriguing discovery is that the polar caps on Mars are shrinking at rates similar to those on Earth. Global warming, it seems, is not confined to Earth.” I saw another statement regarding the shrinking of the Martian polar caps in an earlier issue of Astronomy, but unfortunately I didn’t make a note of which issue contained the statement, and that time, as in this current article, the fact that the polar caps are shrinking was only mentioned in passing.

So I would like to urge Mr. Blevins to follow his apparent first inclination to go ahead and vote for Mr. Bush because it doesn’t look like the warming climate can be blamed on human causes. It looks to me like it’s caused by solar variations, and no politician, however environmentally correct he is, can do anything to effect that.

Teresa A. Gordon,

Baldwin