Climate ‘alarmism’

Dear Editor,

I am surprised that David Golding (letters, en February 2024) should resort to describing those holding my opinion as ‘sinfully complacent’. I assure him that I am deeply passionate about this subject and, although I have many faults, being complacent isn’t one of them. For the record, I spent 16 years as a trustee of an evangelical relief agency. 

The IPCC speaks with many voices and it is not difficult to find some reports supporting Mr Golding’s view, but the IPCC AR6 report of 2021 specifically states that there is no predicted risk of increase in extreme weather events including droughts, storms and floods, amongst others. 

I strongly believe that climate alarmism is one of the secular doomsday cults of our generation, as Christianity has waned in the West, and I am saddened that many churches and relief agencies in particular have succumbed to it. It is a belief system strongly supported by an unquestioning mass media and promoted by a spectrum of people with multiple agendas. These include a variety of players wanting to ban meat consumption, motor car use, and industrialisation itself. 

One does not have to look far to see the harmful effects of this cult. On our own shores a large percentage of youngsters live in fear of catastrophe. They may be right, but climate is unlikely to be the cause. Today as I type this, a further 3,000 workers face redundancy in Wales as their blast furnaces are closed down because they don’t meet the green criteria. Our whole future as a nation is put at risk as such policies are pursued.

As to effects on the planet, we see wind turbines killing rare birds, bats and insects on an industrial scale with offshore installations potentially wiping out whole species of whales.

We are moving into a warmer period in the planet’s history with a greater CO2 concentration. This has contributed to countries such as Ethiopia and India seeing much better harvests and food production. NASA tells us that the planet has become 14% greener in the last 35 years. Hardly a story of disaster.

So often we are presented with an over-simplified explanation of what causes the climate to change, but the reality is far more complicated. The world oceans are by far the greatest repository of CO2 and as the oceans warm, vast quantities of CO2 are released into the atmosphere. The temperature of these oceans is strongly influenced by the strength of solar radiation and undersea geothermal events (volcanoes). Ocean temperatures are barely affected by changes in air temperature; it is the other way round. 

Climate change is a fact of life, as it has always been, but our priority should be to make sure that as many people as possible have the resources, including a resilient power generation system, to deal with any harmful effects, rather than reducing us all to the privations of a pre-industrial age. 

Yours sincerely,
Stephen Carter BSc. 
Musselburgh