Professor speaks sense on climate

Pete Burns has written another illinformed letter on Extinction Rebellion (is that the third or the fourth since Crimble?). It is interesting to contrast his uneducated view with that of Kevin Anderson of the prestigious University of Manchester, Professor of Energy and Climate Change.

PB states, “climate change must be done at the pace the world will accept”. As well as being nonsense or a humorous non sequitur, Prof Anderson states, “If we want to stay well below 1.5 degree warming then the claim (referring to the XR demand) that we need to be somewhere near net zero by 2025 is pretty robust. In fact we need to be zero about now.”

The Professor also exposes the claim of the government, that Pete Burns aligns himself with, that we are leaders in reducing our carbon footprint, as a lie.

That claim is the emissions have been reduced by 44%, but the figure is actually 10% once shipping and air travel are taken into account along with export/import factors, and even that was achieved by accident rather than policy.

Contrary to PB’S view, the Professor also states that relative to prior changes to the earth’s climate, we are doing it “..almost overnight”. Lastly, he states that XR and the youth strikes are responsible for shifting public opinion in a way he and other scientists had failed to do, so they must both continue.

On a different topic, Dave Workman also wrote a curious piece in the same February 20 edition of the letters pages. He states that in Scotland the SNP has ‘lost the lifeboat of EU membership’ which he anticipates will diminish the Scottish Independence movement. But if they believe the EU was fair to them when the UK was part of the EU then it will increase the desire for independence so that they can rejoin that caring federation. Nick Hales By email