Letter: The choice is wind power or selfishness

Sir: It is disturbing to find Michael Meacher (letter, 6 January) repeating predictions about the climate made 10 years ago which have turned out to have been incorrect. There is no scientific consensus that global warming has occurred as a result of CO2 emissions, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has itself backed down on its extreme predictions made in the early Nineties.

Recent research has established the following. Very accurate satellite measurements of the earth's temperature since 1979 have shown no warming but in fact a slight decrease. The oceans have the capacity to absorb 52 times the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, and the lifetime of atmosphere CO2 is about five years. Variations in global temperature correlate very closely with aspects of sun-spot activity. Although the climate has warmed between 0.3 and 0.6 degrees C in the past 100 years, there has been little if any warming in the past 50 years, during which 70 per cent of the total anthropogenic greenhouse gases have been added to the atmosphere.

MICHAEL HIRD

Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire