Dr Ray Brindle, Malmsbury
I dips me lid to M. Francis Kennedy (‘Apologies to Percy Bysshe Shelly’, October 9) and Peter Ryan (‘Fabricated truth!’, October 16) whose contributions both deserve the ‘Letter of the Year’ award. Sometimes you have to laugh.
Those who took the trouble to search for the source cited by our own resident expert on climate change (‘Prophecies vs data’, October 2) will have found that in fact it says the opposite of what he claims. In summary, his source (what is now NCEI, the US National Centers for Environmental Information) says:
“According to the third U.S. National Climate Assessment, Global climate is changing and this is apparent across the United States in a wide range of observations. The global warming of the past 50 years is primarily due to human activities, predominantly the burning of fossil fuels.”
The paleoclimatology data summarised by NCEI, to which our local optimist usefully refers us, shows that we are heading for temperatures not experienced since the middle Pliocene Era, some three million years ago. Not quite the message he intended – on a graph with that length on the time axis the ‘Little Ice Age’ is just an irrelevant ripple, not a useful benchmark. The data show that for the past 10,000 years or so, global temperatures have not varied significantly until the past century. Mr Trump says it will change back again soon. There you are, we can relax.
