IN response to Matt Rylatt (We must act on climate change, Letters, October 27), what possible vested interest does he think I have in stating facts about the benefits CO2 brings?

It’s not pseudoscience to challenge experts or to offer counterarguments, rather it is the foundation of any real scientific enquiry.

Ask any climate scientist how an ice age works. They don’t know.

They have different hypotheses, but when you reach the bottom line they cannot explain it, and here you’re asking them to explain the past, not predict the future.

So I’m sceptical of predictions that tell us exactly how much temperature will rise or its detailed consequences.

Governments have vested interests though, it provides an excuse to tax us.

Classic example, promoting diesel cars. Environmentally friendly due to lower CO2 emissions, then once we’ve made our purchase it’s revealed they release far more insidious pollutants.

So their response will be to ban or tax what we’ve already invested our hard earned cash in.

If the UN wants to reduce the impact of CO2 and the genuine pollution our species creates then it should stop the scaremongering and encourage nations to get the population down, as I’ve always advocated.

Cut the population and all human damage to the planet is cut in proportion. It is so simple you don’t need experts, just common sense and a government with conviction.

Dr Scott Marmion, Woodthorpe, York

We must wake up to air pollution problem

THE director general of the World Health Organisation writes that so serious is air pollution that merely by breathing, seven million people a year are killed and billions more harmed, especially the developing bodies of our babies and children.

WHO health professionals are pressing for health in policy decisions, moving away from energy and transport based on fossil fuels. England’s response? ‘Frack!’

Energy Minister Claire Perry is reported as meeting privately with key shale companies, including Third Energy.

Freedom of Information reveals her plan to export a UK model for shale gas extraction.

Success for her, she states, is “several wells in production” and a “line of sight to commerciality”.

Meanwhile the latest Government action plan to combat illegal levels of air pollution in our urban areas is described by lawyers as pitiful. Cognitive dissonance again!

We are in a very serious position. We must wake up!

David Cragg-James,

Stonegrave

Disgraceful tactic to silence opposition

THE use of the sobriquet “climate change denier”, aimed by Councillors Barnes and Kramm against Councillors Warters and Richardson during the recent council fracking debate, really does need calling out.

The only other collocation with the word “denier” is “holocaust”.

It is truly a deliberate, sickening, Orwellian attempt to discredit those of us who are justifiably sceptical about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s increasingly hysterical warnings by suggesting a moral equivalence with those deluded individuals who claim that the extermination of six million Jews by the Third Reich simply didn’t happen.

This is a disgraceful tactic worthy only of zealots who seek to silence opposition rather than engage with it.

Rory Mulvihill,

Palmes Close,

Naburn, York