Readers’ letters: Europe should take lead on climate emergency

Net zero targets look lost, including here in Scotland by 2045. It started so promisingly with the optimism of the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015 when 195 countries pledged to collectively keep global warming below 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. Last year the planet surpassed that level and many scientists believe that mitigation measures are now vital given the largest polluters like the US are not taking global warming seriously.

Here man-made climate change deniers Reform threaten to ignore “net stupid zero” and have the UK join the US in accelerating global warming if elected. Already this year an estimated 2,700 have died in the UK due to the heat, almost twice as many as 2025, a record year. Are we prepared for tens of thousands of deaths each year and mass food shortages? Our children need politicians to act. Who can blame them for not trusting parties to work together, especially Reform who claim to “adore democracy”, yet put fear for their leader ahead of fear for the planet?

Where will hope come from, given Andy Burnham has put the cost of living, devolution, social care and housing ahead of the climate emergency? Acting alone is futile, it requires collective action with European partners who with the UK started this warming trend and have an obligation to lead in finishing it.

Neil Anderson, Edinburgh

Long view

The daily headlines relating to the European heatwaves should be enough to make us sit up pay heed to those such as Simon Stiell, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. He stated: “The fingerprints of the climate crisis are all over it – it’s the latest price to pay for fossil fuel pollution baking the planet.”

Such pronouncements which are accompanied by reports of “unprecedented” drought conditions and temperatures that are the “highest since records began” appear to leave little doubt that we are close to much feared climate “tipping points”.

However, temperature data only began to be recorded around the 1880s so to use this as a baseline to demonstrate unprecedented heat ignores dozens of historical accounts which, although of course they cannot provide accurate temperatures, identify dozens of severe droughts with excessive heat, dried-up European rivers, massive crop failures, wildfires and livestock and human deaths, often in successive years.

Those who trouble to look even further back in time will discover some 14 great civilizations from Ancient Egypt to the Mayans of Central America that experienced entirely natural, but catastrophic changes in the climate which were major factors contributing to their ultimate demise.

This is not to say that there has been no modern yet modest human warming influence on the climate from greenhouse gas emissions but to attribute current changes to carbon dioxide which constitutes just 0.043 per cent of atmospheric gases is a gross simplification when there are infinitely more chaotic, complex natural forces at work, just as they have been throughout the centuries.

It’s time to rein in the costly idealogical obsession with net zero and adopt a more pragmatic long-term approach to adaptation and an energy transition.

Neil J Bryce, Kelso, Scottish Borders

Testing times

I read David Millar's letter on ScotRail’s new app (14 August) with interest. In my view it should be our new Prime Minister’s priority to introduce a law whereby it is illegal to launch a new website for selling goods, tickets, reservations etc without having it first tested and passed by five octogenarians chosen at random. Penalty for a first offence – trying to send an Amazon gift voucher to a grandson for his birthday.

Michael Grey, Edinburgh

Hurry up

It is hard to believe that Waterloo Place in Edinburgh will be closed for three months to replace 70 metres of sewer pipe, the equivalent of six metres per day.

Goodness knows the cost of the works, far less the cost and inconvenience of traffic diversions.

During this time, expensive heavy equipment will lie unused for perhaps 120 hours of a 168-hour week. In Japan, a similar piece of work might take as little as four weeks.

Perhaps instead of paying the CEO of Scottish Water a £250,000 bonus, they should have funded a short trip to Japan for him to learn how to do things quickly and cheaply?

Brian Barbour, Haddington, East Lothian

Do the math

With predictable Scottish nationalist automatic reaction, Alex Orr (Letters, 14 August) treats us to the customary panoply of alibis and excuses for Scotland’s annual dismal performance in the GERS.

The “levers” and the "current constitutional arrangement”, as well as half of Ireland’s fortunes, all figure.

Like so many nationalists, Mr Orr knows what the UK and Scotland need, but he is incapable of knowing how to achieve growth.

Simply throwing off the UK is not the answer, whatever Mr Orr thinks. He needs a foolproof plan for making Scotland more genuinely prosperous. And I have yet to see a nationalist produce such a thing.

It really is simple. Do the math.

Jill Stephenson, Edinburgh

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