ONE certain way to ensure wrong conclusions is to start with false premises, as is amply illustrated by Dr Charles Wardrop's letter (August 15) about climate change.
Dr Wardrop starts by asserting that “the ‘pause’ in global warming for nearly two decades is continuing”. That is not true. There are four main global temperature series, two surface and two satellite. All four show that the more recent of Dr Wardrop's two decades has seen the fastest decadal rate of global temperature rise ever recorded. The surface and satellite measurements average 0.36C and 0.34C rise respectively in the last decade, more than twice as fast as the average of 0.17C and 0.13C per decade since the 1970s.
Dr Wardrop continues by referring to the "UK's tiny proportionate contribution to world greenhouse gas output", when in fact the UK's 2014 per capita emissions, at 6.53 tonnes CO2/person/year is similar to China's (7.41) and much larger than India's (1.72). Moreover, those figures do not take into account the UK's much larger historical emissions and the fact that we now rely for much of our manufactured goods upon China, whose CO2 emissions are thus increased.
Finally, Dr Wardrop misunderstands the scientific method, which does not aspire to "prove" hypotheses. To claim, therefore, that a given hypothesis is "unproven" is an empty statement, devoid of consequence.
Global warming and its resulting climate change and sea level rise are proceeding apace and pose great dangers. We in the UK bear heavy historical responsibility for it and must play our part in mending the damage we have done to the atmosphere, the science about which is clear. That means retaining the Climate Change Acts, and indeed striving for ever more stringent targets for combatting this severe threat to the future of human civilisation and global biodiversity.
Roy Turnbull,
Torniscar,
Nethy Bridge,
Inverness-shire.
PROFESSOR Tony Trewavas (Letters, August 15) raises some contentious issues which are difficult to address in a short letter. He expresses doubt about the adoption of renewables because of land use. But the land use issue long precedes the introduction of modern wind and solar farms with the relentless expansion of agriculture to support the huge over population of the planet by humans. Of the 70 per cent habitable land on the planet more than 50 per cent is already commandeered by homo sapiens. Continuing destruction, for mono-culture farming, of the forests in Africa, South America and Indonesia is rapidly forcing all other mammals to the increasingly unsustainable margins. Unfortunately, since the negative reaction to Professor Paul R Ehrlic’s The Population Bomb, published some 50 years ago, population control as a political issue has been largely avoided.
Prof Trewavas is being too negative about storage possibilities for renewables having perhaps been unconvinced by the hype for purely electrical techniques. However very promising low-level gravitational techniques such as lagoon, deep mine shaft, and floating island methods currently being pioneered in China, Japan and Denmark, seem more likely to provide our future storage requirements.
While nuclear power generation, particularly fusion if it can be mastered, represents a viable source of carbon-free electrical power, achieving meaningful power levels capable of countering climate change will take far too long. The transition to carbon-free power has to be nearing full development by 2030 to be effective in limiting climate change.
Alan J Sangster,
237 CraigmountTerrace,
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