Cheaper energy from fossil fuels can help poorest out of their desperate situation – Herald letters (2)

Cheaper energy from fossil fuels can help poorest out of their desperate
situation

WHETHER Alan Sangster’s dream of the future (Letters, October 13) is a
flight of fancy I cannot tell.

Certainly, a continental super-grid gathering and distributing renewable
energy across Europe sounds as if it would be a grand achievement, though I
note that earlier ideas such as massive battery farms and electric-powered
vehicles have failed to convert from dream to reality on a useful scale.

But there is good news from the world of science which should relieve Mr
Sangster’s fears of an impending climate catastrophe.

First, the scientists who predicted rapid warming of the planet have thus
far been proved wrong. We are now approaching two decades without any
statistically significant increase in global mean tempera­tures, despite a
steady increase in CO2 in the atmosphere from fossil fuels. That is almost
as long as the period of relatively rapid warming from the late 1970s which
caused the fears of future catastrophe.

Secondly, numerous recent papers in scientific journals suggest that the
climate is not as sensitive to increases in CO2 as had been assumed. This
implies that any need to reduce fossil fuel use is not as urgent as
previously assumed.

There is more good news, this time from the Department of Energy and
Climate Change. Noting the recent fall in prices of wholesale gas, oil and
coal, the UK Government last week slashed its predictions for the price of
power by almost 20 per cent for the rest of this decade. Cheaper energy
from fossil fuels makes the cost of wind and other renewable energy less
viable. If we could save the subsidies from renewables then perhaps we
could invest in the technology to develop existing and alternative sources
of cheap and clean energy.

Here is my dream. It is for lower energy costs, which already have a track
record of helping the poorest in the world out of crippling poverty. That
seems a more attainable and worthy aspiration than crippling our economy by
the fears and costs associated with preventing a possible future
catastrophe. The evidence for that apocalypse is looking increasingly
threadbare.

Councillor Cameron Rose,
Conservative Group Leader, Edinburgh City Council, City Chambers, Edinburgh.

PROFESSOR Tony Trevawas (Letters, October 10) displays a nice sense of
irony in accusing Glasgow University students of a “lack of critical
faculties … [concerning] … common assumptions made about fossil fuels”
and of “hiding behind the skirts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC)”.

As a Fellow of the Royal Society (RS) Professor Trevawas is no doubt aware
of its recent joint report on Climate Change with the American National
Academy of Sciences (NAS). This states that there is “incontro­vert­ible
evidence of planetary-scale warm­ing”, and that “recent climate change is
largely caused by human activities … [which have] … signifi­cantly
disturbed the natural carbon cycle by extracting long-buried fossil fuels
and burning them for energy, releasing CO2 to the atmosphere.”

The RS/NAS and the IPCC reports are rigorously based on the work of
thousands of international scientists with relevant expertise. By contrast,
Prof Trewavas’s Scientific Alliance was set up to promote the interests of
companies, many of which have a commercial interest in denying fossil
fuel-induced climate change.

Colin Weatherley,
8 The Paddock, Gullane.