Keep an open mind on climate change

THE Government’s announcement about the full-time return to school in August is very welcome, but setting aside the need for continuing education, it is important to understand that it wasn’t just a case about impact on families versus the safety of children and school staff.

For my mind, two things were more material in the decision to accelerate the return to school. Firstly, under the previous guidance, education authorities were asked to be “creative and imaginative” in their drafting of their planning for the return and many were far from that. Secondly, and more importantly, there was growing evidence about the detrimental effect on the wellbeing and mental health of our children from lack of contact with their pals and outdoor play opportunities as a result of the lockdown.

A recent report, commissioned by the UK’s Play Safety Forum and written by David Ball, professor of risk management at Middlesex University, contained evidence causing the author to come to the conclusion that the UK policy was much more harmful to children than beneficial. Citing statistics showing the extremely low risk to children from the virus and the evidence that children’s role in transmitting it being fairly limited, the report urges that children’s social and emotional wellbeing be prioritised in all decisions relating to the easing of lockdown and reopening of schools.

Also quoted in the report is the scientific consensus that the risk of transmission of Covid-19 is much lower outdoors than indoors due to air movement and the effect of UV light on the virus and on contaminated materials. All this would support allowing children to play together outdoors and to increase the trend to more outdoor education. We also should commend this report for its support of more rational, evidenceinformed decision making.

Harry Harbottle Portpatrick

SO, after weeks spent implicitly criticising Boris Johnson’s lockdown easing measures as overly hasty, Nicola Sturgeon, in response to sustained criticism, including from businesses, employers, workers, schools and parents, eventually provides lockdown lifting plans for north of the Border. Most measures are being lifted a day or so differently to England – presumably just to be different, and bizzarrely, after her rhetoric around the need for caution, in some cases sooner than England.

We still await news from the SNP administration about revisions to social (pointlessly rebranded here as “physical”) distancing, without which shops and the hospitality industry can’t function. Doubtless this will also more or less replicate what Downing Street has decided, though using cosmetically different language and a slightly alternative timeline.

And Ms Sturgeon claims she’s above politics these days.

Martin Redfern

Melrose

ROBERT McNeil’s articles are always highly enjoyable, and he is bang on the money with his comments regarding Boris Johnson splurging £900,000 of public money on repainting a plane (June 21). To do such a thing in these difficult days with businesses struggling due to lockdown and many people facing economic hardship is not just “plane daft” and an expensive and insensitive waste of public money, it suggests that Mr Johnson is up in the clouds when it comes to making sensible decisions, and one can only wonder what role his top political adviser and co-pilot Dominic Cummings played in this flight of fancy.

Was it for advice like this that the Prime Minister stubbornly clung to Mr

Cummings in the teeth of the public’s disgust? Mr Johnson needs to be brought back to earth with a bump, and face being grounded, permanently. Ruth Marr

Stirling

NEIL Rothnie (Letters, June 21) obviously doesn’t know that there are many theories on what makes the climate change, so I will enlighten him.

He knows of the warming theory involving manmade greenhouse gases. The late Stephen Schneider was a leading proponent of this. In 1975, he announced to the world his concern for the build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere. Incidentally, pre-1975 he was warning the world of a looming global cooling crisis, but all of his cooling work has been deleted.

Many alternative theories on climate have been announced. In 1997, Henrik Svensmark published his first paper on the link between cosmic rays and climate. In 2008, Nicola Scafetta announced his research suggesting that most climate change is due to the influence of planetary motion on the sun, and William Gray suggested ocean currents. In 2014, James Kamis suggested that mantle plumes and plate tectonics drove the climate and, in 2016,

Arthur Viterito suggested vulcanology. Many scientists have claimed that changes in the earth’s magnetic field are the dominant driving force on climate, or that simply nobody really knows.

I respectfully suggest that Mr Rothnie be more open-minded.

Geoff Moore

Alness

NEIL Rothnie may be genuine in his beliefs that mankind can save the planet by giving up fossil fuels His contempt for the North Sea oil industry is puzzling, since without it the UK would have been held to ransom by foreign nations. The UK has a miniscule 1.13 per cent of global emissions, Scotland 0.15%, but China (30%) India (6%) and numerous other countries are still building coal-fired plants to drive their economies using cheap fossil-generated electricity, not mega-expensive wind electricity.

Mr Rothnie mentions climate chaos but he, and others who believe the computer climate modelling forecasts, will be upset to learn that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has, once again, stated that there is little basis for claiming that droughts, floods, hurricanes and tornadoes have increased, much less increased due to greenhouse gases. Clark Cross Linlithgow