Severely wanting

If, as your editorial (Lack of support for emissions plan brings out West Coast wrath, February 5), states, that the West Coast Regional Council isn’t convinced that human activity is responsible for global warming, then that council’s research capability is severely wanting.

The council’s submission to the Zero Carbon Bill states that the science behind the Bill and the evidence proving anthropogenic climate change, must be presented and proven beyond reasonable doubt.

Surely anthropogenic global warming is now well beyond the test of reasonable doubt. I was teaching the basic climate science to senior high school environmental studies classes over 30 years ago.

In 1990 the NZ Climate Change Programme stated that if current trends in atmospheric accumulation of greenhouse gases continued, the total concentration of such gases by the mid21st century could be double what it was before the industrial revolution, and that such a doubling could result in temperatures changing at a rate beyond anything which the Earth’s ecosystems