Earth’s core not linked to warming

From: Dr John D Rayner, Humberdale Drive, North Ferriby, East Yorkshire.

WHILE not wishing to detract in any way from the achievements of Richard Hammond’s BBC TV series on the inner workings of our planet, I must disabuse PH Green (Yorkshire Post, July 29) of his belief that the heat of the earth’s core is sufficient to negate theories of global warming.

Although Hammond’s first programme was indeed educationally rich in facts and stunning images relating to geology, volcanism and plate tectonics, it contained precious little relating to surface climate and the arguments surrounding climate change.

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Indeed, the programme was not designed to address that latter issue, and so gave no sense of the wider context of global temperature flows. Only in the final few minutes of the hour-long programme was there one conjecture that after a further several million years of continental drift, the planet’s surface might have just one “super-continent” with very different weather patterns and climate conditions than we enjoy today.

The energy represented by the earth’s core heat is largely taken up by driving the mechanisms of volcanism and plate tectonics – heat energy being converted into motion energy, affecting huge masses of rock, and cycling through the mantle convection.

Relatively little of the core energy reaches the surface as heat other than through occasional lava eruptions – indeed, the planet is not “generating heat” as PH Green contends, but merely losing very slowly the heat energy that has been present since the planet was first formed.

So where does this leave us regarding global warming? Very simply put, our climate mechanisms are complex and subtle, and seemingly small or insignificant factors can produce much larger effects.

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Therefore I hope PH Green will now recognise that while we cannot survive without the heat of the earth’s core, its constant background effect is entirely discounted before we begin to account for the processes of climate change.

Blinkered Ministers

From: Liz Schofield, Halifax.

I WAS interested to read Jack Blanchard’s article (Yorkshire Post, July 27) about the debacle surrounding the ESA benefit test.

It is not surprising to me that the introduction of the new system in 2008 has been hailed as a success by Ministers.

I suspect the reason for this is that they are blinkered when reading statistics and can only look at one set of figures at a time. Otherwise, they might have considered the number of upheld appeals at 39 per cent to be worthy of alarm bells ringing.

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I’m afraid that the quote in the article from Steve Webb, Work and Pensions Minister, rings a bit hollow for me. By the time they have finished whittling down the numbers of people getting benefit because of incapacity using the new rigid criteria, there won’t be anyone left to receive “unconditional support”. How silly of me, that’s the point of the exercise.

I am sure most of us with an ounce of common sense appreciate that there may well be some people claiming Incapacity Benefit or Employment and Support Allowance who could, and perhaps for their own well being should, be encouraged and helped back into the workplace. But for many others that just isn’t an option.

Folly to cut food crops

From: Dick Lindley, Altofts, Normanton, West Yorkshire.

AS a former Tory election agent, I was appalled to read of David Cameron’s silly and naive attempt to justify giving almost £10bn of our cash to support the incompetent governments of Africa while many people here in the UK are desperately short of money and living in virtual poverty.

It is , of course, heartbreaking to see the poor hungry children of these badly run Third World countries dying from lack of food, particularly when as we all know, those same countries can spend billions on equipping their armies with modern weapons of war.

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The question which David Cameron needs to ask himself is this, if those countries are able to purchase military hardware why, before making such purchases, are they not spending their available funds to feed their starving kiddies as their first priority?

Ironically, as the world shortage of food becomes more pronounced every year, the amount of available food for distribution to the hungry people in Third World nations is reducing and as a consequence becoming more and more expensive and yet David Cameron’s government is, as I write, attempting to reduce the amount of food grown in our country by several million tons per year.

They are trying to coerce farmers into reducing the area of farmland used to grow wheat and to make the extra land so created into beetle banks, wild flower reserves, bird sanctuaries and other such bunny-loving silliness. The price for this lunatic policy will, in part, be paid for by the starving children of Africa.

I hope that those whose support such idiotic policies are able to sleep soundly in their beds at night knowing that they have managed to reduce the amount of food in the overall world market and as a consequence have helped to condemn even more children in the Third World to a life of hunger and misery.