As a chartered engineer with over 60 years’ professional experience, I would like to award David Hampton nine out of ten for stating the obvious and one out of ten for the technical and historical content of his letter on solar energy (BFP, September 12).

We have known about greenhouse gases for nearly 200 years. Not less than 80 years as quoted by David Hampton. It was Joseph Fourier (1768–1830), the French physicist, mathematician and engineer, who first established that most diatomic gases (gases made of two different atoms) ie, carbon di-oxide (CO2), water vapour (H2O), etc, retain heat reflected from the earth’s surface. Hence them becoming known as “greenhouse gases”. Carbon dioxide is the weakest of all the greenhouse gases and water vapour the strongest. Ninety-five per cent of the greenhouse effect is caused by water vapour not carbon dioxide.

Solar energy will never be an adequate source of useful, efficient energy until engineers/physicists can find a way to efficiently store large quantities of solar energy to compensate for those periods of time when there is no sunlight.

During an English winter day, it is unlikely that the sun will shine for more than nine hours out of every 24. If we are totally dependant on solar energy for our lighting and heating, perhaps David Hampton could tell us where that energy will come from on a cold, wet, dull, windless day in the middle of December. — Anthony Weeden, Bockmer End, Nr Marlow