Historic climate fluctuations do not excuse the human impact on the planet - Yorkshire Post Letters

MP Laycock (June 30) writes to say that climate fluctuations over human history reduce the significance of rapidly changing climate linked to human activity; that temperature data is distorted by wrongly sited weather stations and that the heat trapping effect caused by greenhouse gases means that heat is also prevented from reaching the Earth in the first place. Respectfully, these claims are all factually mistaken.

1. Current warming has no precedent in over 100,000 years. Atmospheric CO2 levels have not been as high as they are now for over three million years. The most important difference between what we see now as opposed to natural climate variations are that current rising mean temperatures are driven by human activity, they are relatively rapid, and ‘civilised’ humanity has no experience of the world we are creating for ourselves; lacking strong answers to emerging problems of food production, availability of water in dry regions, fire, rising sea levels affecting low lying areas where most people live, mass extinctions and ocean acidification. These unwelcome changes are likely to worsen political and economic failure, social stress and disease.

2. Global temperatures are measured using thousands of land stations and sea buoys and satellite data. Where weather stations become inappropriate they are withdrawn. This data is tested and challenged by independent teams for its true value; that’s how science works.

3. Greenhouse gases act like a duvet. They do not stop solar radiation as visible light getting in, but they do reduce Earth’s infrared radiation getting out, changing the heat properties and behaviour of our atmosphere and seas.

I’m afraid that MP Laycock’s suggestions are liable to mislead. It is essential that we all focus on net carbon emission reductions as set out in the 2015 Paris agreement, based on the excellent, thorough and serious science publicly available to readers who want to look at it via websites such as the IPCC, our own Climate Change Committee, the Royal Society, the UK Met Office, NASA, or any number of equivalent organisations in Europe and elsewhere.

Understanding that we have to be realistic and even courageous in responding to the science is crucial if we are to avoid our already very serious problems getting a great deal worse.