‘Refreshingly sane’ view of climate change

Sir, – Michael Alexander’s article on the Science of Climate Change (The Courier, October 29) was a refreshingly sane view of a topic that too often breeds hysteria.

If you take the long view, it’s clear that we’re not going to destroy the planet.

It’s big enough to take care of itself.

As far as we can tell, the Earth has enjoyed greenhouse periods, when there was no permanent ice anywhere, and colder periods, such as we’re in now and have been for some millions of years.

But, overall, the greenhouse periods are thought to account for over 80% of history.

Life evolved and flourished when temperatures were much higher than today (and radioactivity too).

It’ll cope with anything we throw at it.

We’ve moved from an atmosphere of 280 parts CO2 and 999,720 parts other stuff to a mix of 410/999,590.

Given that CO2 is essential to life, life is doing surprisingly well on very little. What is at risk is the thin veneer of human civilisation with which we’ve coated the planet. Because it’s thin, it’s vulnerable. Because it’s new, its durability is yet to be fully tested.

That said, we should use the Earth’s resources carefully and cleverly. We shouldn’t burn hydrocarbons when we could use them to make stuff but neither should we burn biomass.

The idea that we can reduce CO2 by building power stations that burn mostly carbon is plain daft. Nor should we concentrate on intermittent power sources till we’ve cracked the storage question.

Finally, we should be sceptical of scientific consensus, particularly when some of the consensual scientists depend on following the herd for their livelihood. Simply being a “scientist” doesn’t make someone infallible.

At one point, the scientific community believed in phlogiston. That didn’t make it true. Dave Dempsey. 7 Carlingnose Park, North Queensferry.