The key question is: what is causing climate change?

In your comment column of 22 March ‘Making net zero a win-win’, you clearly tried to take an even-handed stance.

Like many others I don’t think that net zero can be anything other than a lose-lose situation, as the UK is currently demonstrating in spades, but that is not the point of this letter.

Your use of the phrase ‘climate change denier’ encapsulates three separate aspects of the matter, and just epitomises the half-baked thinking which surrounds the issue.

Most thinking people realise that the climate is changing, and that it always has. This is in itself a different issue from global warming, but again most rational people realise that the Earth’s temperature is changing, and that it always has.

The question is: what causes these changes?

When we get to this question we are talking about matters of great complexity, and reasons which are far reaching and very varied. Examples of important issues are Milankovitch cycles (the Earth’s orbit varies in shape, its angle of rotation varies, and its axis of rotation ‘wobbles’), the effect of volcanoes, the effect of solar cycles, the effect of holes in the ozone layer, and the effect of cloud cover. But there are no doubt other factors to consider, and it’s so complex that there may well be factors which have probably not even been thought of.

But what you can say with a very high degree of certainty is that atmospheric CO2 levels are not the problem. While the actual reasons for the Earth’s temperature fluctuations are highly complex, different people have looked at particular aspects of the question. So far as I know nobody has tried to pull it all together, though many have pointed out the folly of fixating on CO2 levels.

On 24 April 2024 you kindly published my letter in which I was able to demonstrate that there is absolutely no correlation between atmospheric CO2 levels and the Earth’s temperature over long periods of time – over many millions of years.

It is true that in the 20th century people thought that they had detected a correlation between atmospheric CO2 levels and temperature change. In fact they were looking at far too small a time scale, and even then the perceived correlation started to fail in the early 21st century. Unfortunately by then the supposed correlation had already taken on a life of its own, and for many people had become an article of faith. Like any article of faith, the idea of the need for net zero has become impervious to reason.

And a huge amount of commercial vested interests have now developed to support net zero. Whole industries have grown up to provide for requirements such as rechargeable batteries, wind turbines, solar panels, and much else, with millions, perhaps billions, of pounds at stake. They aren’t going to willingly let the chance of making this sort of money slip through their fingers.

Personally I don’t have much expectation that any rational thought will prevail on the issue any time soon among political leaders either here or in the UK. One can always hope of course, but truly the western world has gone mad.

It needs to be added that the focus on emissions has distracted attention from the real elephant in the room, which is that the mushrooming of the world human population has exacerbated the problem that the planet’s natural resources are strictly finite. I don’t just mean fossil fuels, but mineral ores of metals and other materials that we need for our lives; and in particular the land on which to grow food and build housing for the Earth’s growing numbers. This is where mankind should be looking, though it’s an infinitely harder problem to solve than the question of emissions.

BOB PERKINS

Les Corneilles, Rue de la Ronde Cheminee, Castel