Sir, – It will be a scandal if Nicola Sturgeon gets to continue with what amounts to a daily party political broadcast on the BBC thus giving her an unfair advantage over the other parties in the run up to May’s Holyrood elections. If this was happening in Westminster there would be uproar.
Sturgeon has been lucky, so far, in the supine nature of her MSPs and the fact that the labyrinthine nature of the Salmond affair has managed, largely, to obscure the seriousness of that matter.
But that is no reason why the Scottish people should be short changed in the democracy stakes.
Time for your government to grow up, first minister, and time to start treating us as adults.
John Nicoll.
7c Queen Street,
Broughty Ferry.
Enough with the sensationalist causes
Sir, – Re the debate on the relevance of Extinction Rebellion and its protests.
The difficulty for me is that the major polluters of the planet are not based in Scotland or even in the UK.
They are countries in South America burning rainforests for increased agricultural food production, China with its huge population and dependency on fossil fuels, America which has been slow for political and economic reasons to recognise the problem and countries on the African continent whose populations are poorly informed of issues such as global warming.
The fact is the major threat to our planet, is over-population. The growing population needs fed, housed and looked after at lowest cost.
Hence destruction of forests, fossil fuel usage, plastics usage, etc. If Extinction Rebellion wishes to make a credible difference, the protests should be being made in the countries that contribute most to environmental destructiveness.
It is convenient and self-satisfying to dress-up and parade through UK streets to no effect whatsoever.
People are growing rather tired of publicity-generating sensationalism in the behaviours of pressure groups.
Derek Farmer.
Knightsward Farm,
Anstruther.
Reef analysis doesn’t play to climate tune
Sir, – Studies of coral reefs in the Paracel Islands, the disputed archipelago equidistant from Vietnam and China, suggest the surrounding sea started to warm up before the industrial revolution really got going in the 19th Century.
Scientists from the South China Sea Institute of Oceanology argue in a peer-reviewed paper published in Quaternary Sciences that man-made carbon dioxide emissions cannot possibly explain such an early rise in the warming trend.
The Paracels have one of the largest living reefs in the Pacific region and provide useful climate records because the higher the temperature the faster the reefs grow.
Samples drilled from locations continuously underwater and suffering minimal disturbance from human activity were dated with uranium technology and were shown to contain a continuous climate record going back to 1520.
This was confirmed by independent analysis.
The study will “fill serious gaps in global high resolution marine environment records and help climate scientists understand the history of environmental change in tropical waters”.
Temperatures 500 years ago were lower than today but the warming trend started in the 1820s. This undermines the Paris Accord whose goals assume warming started at the end of the 19th Century and will put climate activists on the back foot at Glasgow’s COP26.
Dr John Cameron.
Howard Place,
St Andrews.
Confusion over Covid vaccinations
Sir, – There appears to be great confusion regarding vaccinations for Covid-19,
Ten days after I had a jab at our local surgery I received an invite to attend a local hospital for vaccination.
People queuing at the hospital were sent home due to cold weather and double booking.
How can our first minister be proud of this shambles?
A A Bullions.
Glencairn Crescent,
Leven.
