Editor, Gazette-Journal:

A recent Readers Write (“Creating a ‘State of Fear’ about climate change,” Aug. 21 issue) raises concerns about responding to the threat of climate change. The writer creates a false choice between doing nothing or “Strangle our economy and way of life in a futile effort to halt what is happening naturally?”

He then goes on to cite two fictional sources as justification for his approach of doing nothing. The first is a novel, “State of Fear,” by Michael Crichton, and the second is the website junkscience.com. No doubt Mr. Crichton is a wonderful novelist who has written numerous best sellers, but a fictional creation is really not a basis for decision making about major policy issues, since fiction can turn out any way the author chooses.

The junkscience website has been around since the early ’90s and was initiated by the Philip Morris-created The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), whose pur...