Letters: Climate change and trust

Don't 'trust' climate scientists, just trust the evidence

Apparently, scientists are supposed to be infallible paragons, whose pronouncements are never less than utterly certain. Following the shocking discovery that climate scientists are human beings, we keep hearing variants of that cliché-cry of know-nothing bafflement: "How can I possibly believe anything that scientists say?" The answer is simple: you can use your brain and do some critical thinking.

First, you'll need to get a decent layperson's grasp of the issues at stake. The idea that non-scientists are incapable of understanding the evidence and arguments is nonsense; there are dozens of well-written, lucid, non-technical books on climate science, each of which anybody can read in a day or two.

Second, in the light of this new-found knowledge, you can consider the recent "scandals", and ask yourself three simple questions. Is the erroneously estimated date when Himalayan glaciers are likely to disappear an indispensable pillar of the scientific case for man-made climate change? Is it the only finding cited in the IPCC's report which suggests that the near-future impact of climate change could be very serious, or just one of many hundreds of separate observations supporting this view? Finally, do a few scraps of evidence, trawled from thousands of emails archived at the University of East Anglia during past 15 years, merely tell us that a few individual scientists may have occasionally behaved somewhat less than impeccably? Or do they, as some would have it, provide proof of a vast international conspiracy of deliberate deception, placing the entire body of published findings in this field under serious doubt?

Then you can turn your critical attention to the climate "dissidents" and check out the links between some prominent controversialists and a variety of vested interest groups, such as right-wing think-tanks and their remarkably generous fossil-fuel donors. Once again, the relevant evidence is easily available, to those who care to look for it.

Andrew Clifton

Edgware, Middlesex

Unfortunately the "errors" of the East Anglian climatologists are far worse than mere "bad behaviour by a few academics" or "slightly woolly" science (letters, 4 February). They were an attempted fraud and cover-up by a state-funded authority on a par with the spin pioneered by the Government over the past decade. The loss of honesty at the heart of this culture is near-terminal.

I should add that the evidence from the migrations and extinctions of lepidoptera in the recent period entirely backs up theories of human-induced climate and environmental destruction.

Dr David Spooner

Founder, Butterfly Conservation East Scotland, Dunfermline, Fife

The 'sincere' Blair could still have lied

Howard Jacobson, in quoting Dr Samuel Johnson, shows his knowledge of English literature (Opinion, 6 february); but a grasp of Machiavelli would serve him better in understanding Tony Blair's conduct over Iraq.

That "a man can be disastrously wrong in his judgment and not be a liar" is true; but the fact that, with the invasion, "Blair honestly considered, and considers, it the right thing to have done", does not mean that he did not lie to further his agenda. Machiavellian statecraft would require that he deceive, if necessary, to further his noble aims. On this point at least, Blair seems to have been a good student of the Florentine.

Blair lied to the House of Commons when he stated that Saddam could stay in power, as far as he was concerned, if the dictator gave up his WMDs. We now know from Chilcot, and Blair's television interview, that he was as intent on removing Saddam as Bush, even if it meant providing a different pretext. We know that Colin Powell had to argue with Rumsfeld and Cheney to delay an invasion of Iraq until after Afghanistan in 2001. The US administration was always going for regime change, and Blair can have been in no doubt after the 2002 ranch powwow.

This is prima-facie evidence of deception of Parliament in the interest of starting a war. Whether Blair sincerely believed in his cause is neither here nor there.

Duncan McKeown

Norwich

Howard Jacobson cannot understand the depth of anger which so many of us still feel towards Tony Blair, and accuses us of having "orgied on sanctimony". In his eloquent attempt to exonerate Blair from lying, he overlooks the obvious.

He ignores the ways in which Blair, in writing and in speeches, manipulated and changed the intelligence information in the build-up to war. Information which undermined the case for war was left out, caveats were ignored, and the doubts became certainties. "No solid evidence" was changed to "established beyond doubt".

For Tony Blair to mislead Parliament and the country in this way, in order to take us to war, was unforgivable.

David Simmonds

Epping, Essex

Cameron's record on gay equality

Johann Hari's interview with David Cameron (4 February) exposed the Tory leader's hypocrisy. His evasion of Hari's questions does far more than "sow doubt" in my mind about his commitment to equality.

His party has tirelessly tried to prevent Labour from bringing positive non-discrimination measures on to the statute book. At a European level he has rejected partnerships with mainstream parties, instead jumping into bed with politicians who think that gay people are "abnormal, asocial and abject", while his own MEPs have failed to vote for any equality legislation.

David Cameron and his party do not deserve the trust of any minority community.

Michael Cashman MEP

(Labour, West Midlands)

Brussels

David Cameron states that he met openly gay people for the first time in the Conservative Research Department which he joined in 1988. I have heard him say he was the only heterosexual in the place.

That is rather unkind to the half-dozen or so of my colleagues at that time who shared his proclivities. The scarcity of open gays at Eton and Oxford in the 1980s comes as a great surprise. Can the Brideshead tradition really have been so severely curtailed?

Alistair Cooke

London SW1 (The writer was deputy Director, Conservative Research Department, 1985-97)

Brown's feeble voting reform

Andreas Whittam Smith's excellent article "Change the voting system and we'll change our world" (5 February) neatly explains the link between ministers introducing new policies and attempting to look good in the eyes of the electorate, but he misses the opportunity to complete the circle with his comment over the proposed voting system changes.

The final paragraph states that experts think that the alternative vote system would not make a decisive difference, but it would be a start. Isn't this the whole point of the system being proposed by Gordon Brown? It will look as though something is being done, will not in fact make any difference to the parliamentary make up, and would take decades to be superseded by further changes – no wonder it has the support of the incumbents.

Fraser Yates

Ipswich

Andreas Whittam Smith is right that a change to our voting system would mean a change to the way our politics is conducted. He is wrong, however, in believing that a move to the alternative vote would address the problem of large majorities for the winning party. Most experts believe AV tends to magnify the landslide effect and increase rather than mitigate large majorities.

The solution to voting reform is the single transferable vote; it is more proportional, it retains a constituency link and it allows voters to determine between candidates from the same party. Which is exactly why Gordon Brown and David Cameron fear it so much.

Steve Travis

Nottingham

How refugees lose faith in Britain

I read your article about Prince Bakare ("I'd rather be sent back to my torturers than stay in a detention centre", 4 February) having just visited my friend in Brook House immigration removal centre. Failing any last-minute reprieve he will be in a van as you read this, on his way to Heathrow to be deported to face the torturers in Africa from whom he fled.

You quote from the head of immigration: "We consider every individual case with enormous care and where someone needs our protection, we will grant it and do so ." That statement rings hollow for many I have met. Our legal system seems set up to prevent them having their stories heard. Their lawyers, when they can find one, are overworked and often apparently uninterested.

If they come into contact with the courts for having the wrong papers (whoever was able to get the right papers from a government while fleeing for their lives?) they may receive a "criminal" record and lose even the limited protection against deportation that we may offer.

I have met a few people in similar circumstances. I listen to their stories of their country (where they would love to be if they could be safe) and how they came here. They believe that when they get here Britain will be fair and just and will listen to their case. To see their hopes dashed after they have clung to them despite the mounting evidence that few people care and those that do cannot change the system makes me feel sick to the core.

Dr Gemma Stockford

Burgess Hill, West Sussex

The proposed "voluntary repatriation" of Burmese refugees in Thailand poses a serious risk to their lives and rights (report, 5 February). During a visit to refugee camps on the Thai-Burma border late last year I heard first-hand accounts of widespread human rights violations from refugees who had fled to Thailand from eastern Burma. In the absence of a significant improvement in Burma these repatriations must be stopped.

The international community's political and practical support for the refugees, some of whom have been in the camps for more than 25 years, also needs to be assured; and finally the regime must be forced to work with the United Nations to restore democracy to Burma, and to release Aung San Suu Kyi and all prisoners of conscience.

When this has been achieved, Burma's refugees will be only too happy to return to their homeland.

Lesley Ward

President, Association of Teachers and Lecturers London WC2

Tory worries

I have received correspondence from my MP, Robert Goodwill, shadow transport minister, which includes a questionnaire. The six questions are, in this order, relating to: fox hunting, the local health service, speed cameras, reduction in speed limits, who would be the best Prime Minister and lastly "Have you any worries?" Nice to know what the priorities are.

Brian Crinion

Whitby, North Yorkshire

Decent MPs

So three MPs may have a case to answer. Which means that well over 600 do not. Yet these undervalued and hard-worked individuals, smeared and jeered by the media, and as a result by the public too, represent centuries of struggle and suffering by women and men fighting to obtain democracy. Parliament is not "them" as against "us". Parliament should and can be "us", the mirror of the nation. So I say to those who moan "They're all the same", do something: stand for office yourself.

Ian Flintoff

Oxford

Pylon power

Terence Blacker ("A land despoiled by pylons", 5 February) should be careful not to confuse visual impact and environment damage. One affects humans, the other all species. Friends of the Earth Scotland concluded that pylons on the Beauly-Denny line through the Stirling area are less environmentally damaging than burial. It's certainly not just a question of cost, as he correctly recognises, but responding to our energy challenges will not be answered by over-simplistic solutions.

Professor Patrick Corbett

Energy Academy, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh

Holy innocence

Cherie Booth's disgraceful judgement sets a worrying precedent ("Judge Cherie spares man jail because of his religion", 5 February). Its implication is that to look contrite and parrot off the right sanctimonious keywords will absolve anyone of crime. How many lawyers will now advise their clients, hot off a football terrace on a Saturday afternoon or any high street on a Friday night, to claim belief in a higher power? Welcome to the new dark age of dogma; it's as if the Enlightenment never happened.

Richard Butterworth

London N13

Diggers remembered

You report on the influx of highly paid footballers into Cobham in Surrey (6 February). Cobham is also where Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers set up, in 1649, one of the first communist experiments on George Hill, now a private golf course.

Chris Lilly

London E14