Letter: Delusions over climate change

Published on 25/03/2012 00:00

“FUELLING an inconvenient delusion” – what an apt title for Gerald Warner’s piece (Insight, 11 March). I will leave others to address Mr Warner’s comments on renewables.

On climate change Mr Warner, whose background is I believe in medieval and Irish history, asks us to accept his proposition that concern about climate change is “a superstition”. It must be wonderful to feel able to offer a non expert conclusion on a complex topic without feeling the need to counter the overwhelming evidence contrary to that conclusion from experts.

It must be a disappointment to Mr Warner that the Scottish Government and MSPs from all political parties have, in reaching their conclusions, taken the more conventional approach of listening to evidence from experts in the form of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); their views on the causes of climate change are shared by 97 per cent of climate experts with the relative expertise of the unconvinced 3 per cent “substantially below” that of the huge majority (“Expert credibility in climate change”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 24 June 2010).

I take a delusion as being a belief held contrary to reality; that strikes me as encapsulating Mr Warner’s view nicely.

Tom Ballantine, Edinburgh