Readers Write, for Thursday, Dec. 10

I was teary at best after reading Karen Grimm's Dec. 7 commentary on the challenge of animal control officers who really care about all God's creatures. My husband and I are proud parents to three felines -- one shelter cat and two rescued cats -- who are not allowed outdoors. The primary reason is that they will live longer and healthier if they remain indoors.

But the city where I live, Red Wing, also has a leash law that requires owners to control their cats at all times. Yet the city refuses to enforce the ordinance by warning or citing owners who violate this law by allowing their cats to roam. I have pleaded with my neighbors to leash their cats or keep them indoors because they continually stalk birds under the feeders in our yard and because I have narrowly missed hitting them while driving in our alley on at least two occasions.

Who's really to blame when pet owners willfully let their pets roam, or are careless, and city ordinances are not fully enforced?

CHRISTI BYSTEDT, RED WING, MINN.

Like David Perlman ("Playing the odds on global warming," Dec. 8), I am a mathematician. Once many years ago, the august professors at the U.S. Naval Academy saw fit to bestow such a degree upon me. Perhaps it's due to my academic heritage being from a service academy, but one tenet that was drummed into every statistics class I had was that statistics, when tortured enough, will confess to anything.

Perlman's protestations to the contrary (along with most of the mainstream news media), "Climategate" is not a controversy over means and methods and statistical treatment. It's a story about fraud. As any mathematician knows, statistical sciences are predicated upon the idea of a "fair" game from which the data is obtained. Climategate has shown us that the "game" from which these climatologists have gotten their data is anything but fair. The raw data has been bent, twisted, cherry-picked, erased and deleted to such an extent that it is unreliable.

One of the memes the apologists are shilling is that this is an isolated incident from some backwater university in a backwater country. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is a corruption of the data forming the very underpinning of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, and it completely discredits any conclusions reached by the IPCC.

The global warming debate affects the well-being of every person in this country. The nonsolutions being offered to this noncrisis will literally cost each U.S. citizen tens of thousands of dollars directly in increased fuel and utility costs, and indirectly in increased prices on goods and services that use energy. To strain a worn metaphor, Climategate is the equivalent of breaking the news to a hypochondriac that the cure is worse than the disease.

C.J. SIMONES, FARMINGTON

I arrived to work on Wednesday in 11 minutes via Minneapolis streets. It usually takes 10. Before leaving home, I read your article "Streets will get plowed," about metro cities and their plowing status for the season. Some had some services cut, some were business as usual, but Woodbury's claim was, "residents' expectations for high service levels," would get them super special maintenance.

Thank you, Minneapolis, and all those who were up all night clearing the streets for me. Thank you for giving me great service and anticipating my expectations.

KRISTIN SUNDBERG, MINNEAPOLIS

Why is it that bicyclists in the Twin Cities insist on riding in snowstorms in the traffic lanes? Do you have a goal to spend your last living moments on earth as a hood ornament on an out-of-control automobile?

MIKE TIERNEY, BURNSVILLE

Regarding the news this week about Sen. Dick Day leaving the Legislature in order to lobby for slots at the state's racetracks: Why not put the racino issue on the ballot? Let's see if the tribes can buy the people's votes as easy as they can buy the legislators' votes.

GIBSON CAROTHERS, MINNEAPOLIS

So, University of Minnesota researchers led by associate professor Marla Eisenberg have found that the "overall emotional status [of students having casual "hook-up" sex] was no different than the four-fifths who'd most recently had sex with "a partner, a dating partner, or nonsexually exclusive partners" (front page, Dec. 9)

The evidence you cite supports that conclusion as well.

Your comparative study of sexually active adults would have been far more convincing if you would have included some married people!