AS AN ex-Merchant Navy mariner, it was with considerable excitement and interest that I read about the two 12,000-ton merchant ships recently negotiating the fabled North East Passage.

This was so long dreamed about by traders because it cuts 3,500 miles and ten days steaming off the Far East to Europe route.

Of course, global warming is said to be behind the opening-up of the route during a six to eight-week “window” each summer. Melanie Duchin, of Greenpeace, says: “This is further proof that climate-change is happening now”.

Scientists estimate that the last time the passage was ice-free was 5,000 to 7,000 years ago.

But hang on. Where were all the coal-fired power-stations, cars and all the other heavy CO2 producers 5,000 to 7,000 years ago which, if we’re to believe all the soothsayers and other hair-shirt wearers, would have caused the ice sheet to melt in order to open-up the North-East Passage in those long-ago days?

Further “proof” that the ice-sheet is getting thinner year on year was the recent visit by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to the Arctic.

Measured at the end of the Arctic summer, when the ice is always at its thinnest, it was proclaimed, to the usual shock-and-horror utterances, that the ice is indeed thinner. Why not do this measuring after the Arctic winter? This would be far more convincing as to the true state of the ice.

Strange how the truth about so-called global-warming conflicts with what the “experts” would want us to believe, isn’t it?

If this Government wants to get its collective knickers-in-a-twist over CO2 releases, then do so after it has sorted-out our future power-generating needs, not before as very soon we will be “enjoying” our very own long, dark Arctic winters.

Phil Roe, Roman Avenue South, Stamford Bridge, York.