RE: The global warming debate.

LAST week, I was called an ostrich; this week David Hampton thinks I am a maverick! I wonder what I will be next week.

David Hampton appears obsessed with castigating the oil industry as the cause of global warming. Surely David realises that it does not matter what is burnt to release energy – coal, oil, gas, petrol, bio diesel, ethanol, biomass, wood and even my grandmother’s old cotton knickers – they all produce CO2.

David’s belief that CO2 produced from the burning of fossil fuels is the sole cause of global warming even though the global climate is now cooling, is unproven scientific nonsense for the following reasons: l Firstly, the climate has changed between cold and warm periods over the past 8,000 years whilst the global CO2 concentration remained constant at 280ppm.

l Secondly, the relationship between CO2 and its warming effect is non-linear and follows a logarithmic law i.e. the law of diminishing returns, so as the concentration of CO2 increases the warming effect of that increase gets less.

l Thirdly, CO2 has the weakest greenhouse effect of all the greenhouse gases. Water vapour is the strongest and 25 times more powerful than CO2. Prof Lindzen one of the world’s leading climatologists has estimated that if you removed all the CO2 from the atmosphere you would still be left with 98% of the greenhouse effect.

l Fourthly, about 200 billion tons of CO2 becomes resident in the atmosphere annually. Only 3.6% comes from burning fossil fuels, whereas 53% comes from the world’s oceans and 35% from human respiration.

David Hampton refers to a toxic legacy. I assume he is once again referring to CO2. There is nothing toxic about CO2 for the simple reason that without CO2 in the atmosphere, the planet including the human race would die.

It is through photo synthesis within plants that CO2 is removed from the atmosphere and the oxygen released back to the atmosphere.

Simply put, no CO2, no oxygen, we all die!

David Hampton claims that the entire scientific community believes in man-made global warming. This also total nonsense for the following reason: 2008 will go down as the year when any pretence of a “scientific consensus” in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. It was the year that the counter-consensus emerged with the signing of the Manhattan Declaration signed by hundreds of scientists including many of the world’s most eminent climate experts who have rallied against a “consensus” that was only a politically-engineered artefact based on ever more blatantly manipulated data.

Anthony Weeden, Bockmer End, Nr Marlow