Sir, The Met Office has reluctantly had to admit that global warming has stalled and that by 2017 temperatures will not have risen significantly for nearly 20 years.
Officials also had to reluctantly admit that their previous forecasts were highly inaccurate.
Their explanation was that this flatlining of temperature could be explained by natural variability, changes in solar activity and movements of the oceans.
This is what the sceptics of man-made climate change have been saying for years.
Temperatures have stalled although greenhouse gas emissions have increased in recent decades.
This is not what the “climate change” pundits forecast.
Billions of pounds have been given away to wind turbine developers and others to solve a problem, which was never there in the first place.
There must now be a moratorium on any further wind turbine developments.
An apology from and mass resignation of the politicians who support wind turbines would be welcome.
Clark Cross. 138 Springfield Road, Linlithgow.
Not all in this together
Sir, I am astonished at how Iain Duncan Smith only focuses on the bottom of the social strata for cutting the financial deficit.
So far I have not heard of a debate on the millions of pounds still being spent on the upkeep of the royal family and the rest of the aristocracy. They seem to be exempt.
When they are included in the cutbacks then I will believe that we are all in this together.
Alister Rankin. 93 Whyterose Terrace, Methil, Leven.
Crass, tasteless assertion
Sir, Does Peter Kearney actually believe in the increasingly bizarre pronouncements he is required to make on behalf of the Roman Catholic Church?
Quite apart from the unbelievably crass and tasteless assertion made on a recent edition of the BBC’s Reporting Scotland, what evidence can possibly be attested to support his premise that the supposed “lot” of Roman Catholics in Scotland is comparable to that of blackAmericans prior to and during the civil rights movements of the late 1950s and 1960s?
There have been no lynchings, no churches burned down with their occupants trapped inside, no requirement for voter registration campaigns, no civil rights workers murdered and buried in reservoirs; no laws have been passed in Scotland which conferred any form of civic disadvantage specifically on Roman Catholics which is a voluntary free association and not a genetic identity nor have any judicial decisions sought to do so and I am not aware of the existence of any organisational or company policies which sought to do so.
I am sure I am not the only one who viewed aghast while the report was broadcast, nor can I be the only one who noted the attendant irony of footage of protests from the time campaigning against segregated schools, when Scotland’s Roman Catholics have been provided with just such a facility at their request since 1918.
For how much longer is this organisation to be given a platform with which to traduce, defame and insult Scottish society?
John McNab. 11 Balgeddie Court, Glenrothes.
Singing from same sheet?
Sir, It seems Jim Crumley and the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust have eventually met on some common ground (Monument to worst kind of marketing cynicism, Courier, January 8). Not that we necessarily agree with his criticism of the Year of Natural Scotland initiative but rather his reference to and reverence of Aldo Leopold a man the GWCT regards as the father of game management as a science.
Leopold said of America 80 years ago (Game Management, 1933): “Every head of wildlife still alive in this country is already artificialised, in that its existence is conditioned by economic forces. Game management merely proposes that their impact shall not remain merely fortuitous. The hope for the future lies not in curbing the influence of human occupancy it is already too late for that but in creating a better understanding of the extent of that influence and a new ethic for its governance.”
Conservation is not about protecting nature from the hand of man, it is about managing our fauna and flora so that it sustains us physically and spiritually.
Katrina J Candy. Head of PR & Education, Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust.
Nothing to moan about
Sir, As correspondent Peter Bell (Question still not answered, December 31) well knows, there has not been an English government in existence for the last few hundred years. While the rest of the union enjoy their own local government, the English have to make do with Westminster, where in this, the third millennium, either by birth or descent, Scots have monopolised the position of Prime Minister. Not much to whinge about there, then unless you’re English.
G E Muir. 70 Abbey Road, Scone.