Concerted multi-nationalism needed to tackle climate change - Yorkshire Post Letters

Malcolm Parkin (August 26) and Charles Wardrop (August 27) are the Cannon and Ball of amateur climatology. Both are in various shades of denial about reality, and both intensely pessimistic: “nothing useful we can do” etc.

Malcolm says that he doesn’t know what climate change is all about and Charles resents what he calls a futile effort to influence the climate. He has got this entirely the wrong way around.

The point is that humanity has indeed been influencing the climate, by burning fossil carbon, most especially in the past 50 years as industrial economics has both globalised and intensified.

Here in Britain we lit the historical blue touch paper - with impressive benefits - as a consequence we have seen a rapid rise in average global temperatures profoundly affecting us in Europe and the rest of the world.

The consequences for fire, flood, lost food production, coastal threat from rising sea levels, and damage to human health and lives is monstrous; but not apparently an issue for these two gents.

The drive to net zero, to which we as a country are committed along with many others, some well ahead of us, is of course all about curtailing a huge global experiment to see what happens if we continue to pump 40 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere year after year.

Science is categorical that we need to stop doing this. As for our efforts being only 1 per cent, etc: we are not alone.

Precisely this debate is going on across the globe, as the Malcolms and Charles’s of everywhere else try to persuade their fellow citizens that they uniquely shoulder the burden.

In reality all the “one per cent” countries are greater contributors than China and the US combined, by far.

What we require is concerted multi-nationalism, not a fearful turn-away from the world and the laws of physics. Humanity will either sink or swim as a whole, together.

This could be a cause for great hope and I believe that it will deliver, but meanwhile Malcolm and Charles call to mind a mentality more at home on the bridge of the Titanic. How many of your readers consent to their profoundly irresponsible proposal that we double down and deliberately make climate matters even worse?