UFO Info Week-End

Renewable energy clean coal technology carbon capture and energy efficiency can provide the required 60 per cent cut in carbon dioxide emissions

Renewable energy, clean coal technology, carbon capture and energy efficiency can provide the required 60 per cent cut in carbon dioxide emissions. These industries can also create employment and expertise to export worldwide. He says that there is insufficient space to grow food and build turbines. However, the two are not mutually exclusive; the land around wind turbines can be farmed.Nuclear power is too expensive and too dangerous. However, to state that we have reached the point of no return takes away hope, which could turn his views into a self-fulfilling prophecy.Lovelock dislikes wind turbines, favouring nuclear power. Such efforts would be self-serving in the short term but they could help reduce greenhouse gases if, for example, “clean” coal and nuclear, became the primary transitional source of energy for the next few decades.But that may only be possible if, rather than castigating others and raising wild alarms, environmentalists are willing to sit down at the negotiating table with industry and conservative politicians and do some good old-fashioned “horse trading” in which one side does not feel as if it is being the target of extremist views.DR THOMAS CROWLEYDIVISION OF EARTH AND OCEAN SCIENCES, NICHOLAS SCHOOL FOR THE ENVIRONMENT, DUKE UNIVERSITY, DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA, USASir: Hopefully James Lovelock’s new theory will succeed in waking leaders to the need for urgent action to prevent climate-induced disaster. Yes, it will be warmer in the tropics, but it was probably that warm 100 million years ago in the tropics and life, though very different, was nowhere near to being extinguished.Although I agree with Dr Lovelock on his pessimistic assessment on international negotiations to reduce greenhouse gases, there is some real hope that increases might be contained if first world countries undertook a genuinely serious effort to aspire towards energy independence.

The 2001 IPCC report indicates that these changes are at the very extreme of all model projections; more conservative scenarios yield increases about one half those values.Although I certainly agree that global warming is a real and serious problem, it seems almost outlandish to claim that “before this century is over, billions of us will die, and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic”. So why is legislation to provide the necessary renewable energy development not yet in place? It is time we remembered that wildlife does not need man, but man cannot exist without wildlife.DR PAT HILL-COTTINGHAMSHAPWICK, SOMERSETSir: There are many credible scientists that are very worried about global warming, but who would seriously object to the most significant points raised in the 16 January articles by James Lovelock and Michael McCarthy.Dr Lovelock cites the predictions of 5C tropical and 8C temperate latitude warming by the end of this century. Action, however, should not include nuclear power since that simply adds to the pollution, but we should ask the Government why it has stopped the research money for tidal flow generators.Globally, wave energy could supply 10 times the world’s electricity consumption. In Britain, 100 tidal flow generators could supply 50 per cent of our electricity, 2,000 wind turbines 20 per cent, leaving only 30 per cent to come from energy saving at community level, solar and photovoltaics, ground and water heat exchange systems, insulation and improved energy efficiency.All these would improve our living conditions (and health) and save us money. For the last two years, at least, I have been saying that we have reached a point of no return because we are now in a phase where the failure of normal homeostatic controls has resulted in a positive feedback system and therefore an accelerating one.Things can only get worse unless real action is taken now – we do not have until 2010.

It also highlights the fact that man is just another species – his demise would allow the planet to live as long as the sun exists.But man made the great mistake of assuming superiority over all other species and imposing his “civilisation” with all its polluting accompaniments to interfere with and destroy the natural cycles. If Mr Anderson thinks otherwise he is deluding himself.JAMES GIBSON-WATTHAY-ON-WYE, POWYS Gaia’s revenge: Lovelock predicts global catastrophe Sir: I do not know where James Lovelock (“We are past the point of no return”, 16 January) has been in the last decade but every biologist I know has been teaching the implications of homeostasis for years – even if we didn’t call it Gaia!I spend a lot of time giving talks to local groups, specialist and lay. All Lib Dem MPs held fast to this stance, before and since the invasion, despite a vicious campaign against them within Parliament and in the press by the likes of Mr Anderson.The Lib Dems have consistently opposed tuition fees in higher education and opposed the use of public money to subsidise people to jump NHS waiting lists.I could go on, but instead I challenge Mr Anderson to tell us which party leader has, in the past few weeks, comprehensively ditched the principles and beliefs one assumes he previously sincerely held on the above key issues, and indeed campaigned vigorously in the general election just six months ago on a platform that he has now almost entirely repudiated.Most “middle-class” potential Tory voters are as opposed to tuition fees, a market free-for-all in the public services and invasions of other people’s countries that kill and maim their citizens as the Lib Dems are. Voters will reward Lib Dems for being the party of principle

Sir: Bruce Anderson can hardly contain his visceral hatred of liberal politics (“Does the Liberal Party still have a reason to exist?” 16 January), especially now that the Tories have elected a leader he thinks will recover former Tory votes that have, in recent times, gone to the Lib Dems (or “Liberals” as he insists on calling them). Leaving aside his ludicrous jibes about the Lib Dems’ campaigning methods and policy stances, Mr Anderson ought to ask himself which party (and its leader) has shown the most consistency over the great political issues of recent times.
The Lib Dems were consistently opposed to an invasion of Iraq that so clearly breached international law and resulted in the death of tens of thousands of completely innocent people.