We cannot stop natural climate change

Why does the climate change debate sacrifice objectivity by concatenating separate questions into dogma, and calling doubt, heresy?

‘Is the climate changing?’ Yes, naturally, always, with short fluctuations within longer-term changes. ‘Are human activities influencing the rate of change?’ Perhaps: we might buy time.

We are within, or emerging from, an Ice Age, not one frigid spell but alternating cold and warm phases which, with the varied geology, shape our wonderful landscape.

In the last glacial, Southern English tundra carved the Downs’ valleys and fed a river meeting the lowered ocean off Cornwall. Within the last 10,000 years, retreating ice raised the sea-level, forming the present coasts. (Dorset’s coast is not Jurassic – its rocks are.) Warm phase temperatures increase then decrease, and the ice returns. After an Ice Age, the atmosphere and sea warm much further, and stay warm for millions of years.

We cannot stop this, but if we are increasing the change artificially we might slow it towards its natural rate.

Satisfactory answers? Rampant solar and wind generators will help, but by a tiny fraction of total demand in conditions favourable only to themselves, inefficiently by scale and not environmentally innocently. The real alternatives to fossil-fuelled power-stations are hydro-electric and nuclear; expensive but compact.

Their disadvantages are real but politically exaggerated.

Dorset’s Winfrith, with France, led the world in safe nuclear res-earch – destroyed by politicians.

We will need petroleum and coal for years yet, for fuels and chemicals for so many products on which our rapidly-expanding, profligate population relies.

We cannot stop natural changes, but if we are accelerating them, we might buy time, sensibly, without stupid clichés like ‘climate change deniers’ and ‘zero carbon’.

Nigel Graham Kestrel View Weymouth