Sir, Camilla Cavendish’s (April 6) clarion call for an ambitious programme to maintain climate stability because “a stable climate is a precondition for civilisation” pays scant regard not only to the history of mankind but also the history of climate.

When Cromwell bestrode our world, and the Cavendish family were on the wrong side of a different argument, things were distinctly cooler. When the footsore Saxon Fyrd stood at Hastings they had moved through a land where average temperatures had been higher than anything we have known over the past 100 years; and all this before four-wheel-drive vehicles and cheap flights to Majorca had been introduced.

Camilla Cavendish sees a maddening refusal to acknowledge an awful truth on the part of the climate sceptics. They might respond by pointing to her rather crude scientific assumption that there is a direct gearing between variations in a trace gas in the atmosphere and our ambient temperatures. The factors which affect temperatures are many and their interrelationship is still poorly understood.

She appeals to the correlation between temperature and CO2 levels (presumably over the years since industrialisation began) as a clinching argument and is fascinated at the capacity of the sceptics to ignore this. I think they would be equally fascinated by her inability to see how poor the “fit” is between the two graphs, even when relying on ground station measurements alone. If satellite and balloon measurements are taken into account for the latter years the picture becomes even fuzzier.

DAVID PETCH
London SW14

Sir, Every cloud has its silver lining: but not, it seems, one that portends climate change.

All change hurts someone; but not everyone. Eco-warriors would be more plausible if they tempered their forbodings with a few positives.

G. R. STEELE
Economics Department
Lancaster University Management School

Sir, Camilla Cavendish is correct to berate the climate change sceptics, but she perhaps underestimates the degree of awareness of global warming and self-help present in China.

As an example, more than 20 percent of China is covered by permafrost, which thaws as the air temperature rises. In constructing the Qinghai-Tibet railway, about 550km of which crosses permafrost, means for inhibiting thawing and hence sinking of the railway are being implemented on the assumption that over the next 50 years the regional air temperature will rise by 2C.

Perhaps such foresight in mitigating the local effects of global warming is an example for us, and our infrastructure planning.

PROFESSOR DAVID REAY
School of Engineering and Physical Sciences
Heriot-Watt University
Edinburgh

Sir, Camilla Cavendish’s views on climate change are a breath of fresh air in the staid micro-climate of environmental politics.

As she rightly hints, it is a serious issue that deserves to be at the forefront of the political agenda; it is for precisely that reason we must look to a green liberalism, which “greens” modern lifestyle comforts and continuing prosperity.

Environmental politics is too important to be left to the Green Party and those who would retreat from modern life or introduce intrusive monitoring of individual behaviour. Smart, mainstream environmentalism is long overdue in public debate.

RICHARD HUZZEY
Oxford

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