Blowing hot or cold
From Martin Livermore Sir: Congratulations for publishing some sense about this summer's heatwave (Leading article, 9 August). If the predictions of disaster were based just on people looking out of their windows, there would be little cause for concern, In fact, the reality is much more serious: an unholy alliance of environmentalists, politicians and large parts of the scientific establishment have, as part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), created an ill-considered policy juggernaut that will be hard to stop.
Despite not being able to forecast regional weather accurately more than a few days ahead, the output of a range of computer models showing a wide range of possible long-term temperature increases has been used to project future catastrophe. The answer to this, enshrined in the Kyoto protocol and future treaties, is to take hundreds of billions of euros from the world economy and use them to cure ourselves of our socalled 'addiction' to fossil fuels. Since, as you point out, there are equally strong reasons to think that we may be heading for the next ice age, surely one could also argue that we should be using up our fossil fuels while we still have the chance.
Martin Livermore
Cambridge
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