Central heating is being overused

OF course, it is nice to have central heating, but it can be over-done. During a TV programme on the subject, the camera briefly showed a thermostat showing 27 degrees C, which must be too hot for everyone. During the war, central heating was unheard of, and we still won the war.

People think they need heating to prevent black mould growing on their walls when the real cause is damp from a lack of ventilation, especially when burning live flames without a flue or ventilation. I ventilate into my roof space, so the air inside is dry, even when it is cold and I counter cold with extra clothing before switching on an electric convection heater in one room. I don’t have gas. I am 81 and reasonably healthy while global warming is bound to make central heating and insulation less and less necessary as time goes on.

It is already too late to prevent climate change becoming irreversible because over half the human population will never do enough to bring it under control. The same proportion never needed central heating or air-conditioning anyway, the latter consuming even more fuel than home and office heating.

The first move should be only to heat the rooms we use, not the whole house.

If we were serious about global warming, we should start now cooling the surface of the seas and oceans which distribute the over-heating which is forcing wildlife that can, to move nearer the poles, and those that can’t to face extinction. If we want to preserve most of the species facing extinction we must redeploy the energy rich nations’ waste on air conditioning and use it for cooling Earth’s oceans.