Handout is wrong

climate disaster prophecies that never happened: 1976: Global cooling will cause a Third World War by 2000. 1989: Global warming and rising sea levels will wipe entire nations off the map by 2000. 1999:The Himalayan glaciers will be gone in ten years. 2007: Global warming will cause fewer hurricanes. 2012: Global warming will cause more hurricanes.

Al Gore warned in his propaganda film An Inconvenient Truth that polar bears were facing extinction, yet numbers have dramatically increased.

The refusal to admit the flawed climate science has cost UK taxpayers £150 billion and counting.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world burns fossil fuels.

CLARK CROSS Springfield Road, Linlithgow Carolyn Taylor, like many convinced by the Establisment’s received opinions, evidently believes she and most climate scientists can explain and predict future climatic changes (Letters, 22 July).

In rejecting Geoff Moore’s examples of “howlers” made in climate prediction, she rather misses his main point, that climate predictions can err, often hilariously. She seems, moreover, to conflate “climate change” and anthropogenic global warming (AGW). No-one denies that our climate has, historically, always been changeable, whilst AGW, based on assumptions in computer program modelling, demonising CO2, etc., has become hotly disputed and freighted with politics, perhaps because of the vast efforts and taxpayers’ money involved.

These contentious issues have often been crudely, and inappropriately, polarised to fit in with struggles between international left and right wing interests.

For these reasons, the scientific debate has become intensified It is laudable of the SNP to think of more ways to give handouts to poorer people (your report, 11 July).

There is a cost, of course. The recent bad results at the polls have had an obvious effect on the party’s thinking.

The SNP have ruined the economy (despite the latest figures) and ruined education. They are in the process of ruining the Health Service too.

This is nothing more than a ploy to show how nasty the