IT IS interesting to see that the different views between the 'Believers' and 'Doubters' is still generating much content on your Letters pages.

I was surprised at Valerie Jones (June 27, 'Nature will always prevail') as an ex-meteorologist. While it is perfectly correct that you can’t take one hot year, or even a number of hot years, and say that it’s due to climate change, we have just had the 20 hottest years for the world in the last 22 years. That is a significant climate deviation from normal patterns.

It is perhaps worth re-looking at the long-term weather trends identified by the British Antarctic Survey’s ice cores. Its ice core samples go back three quarters of a million years.

Prior to the start of the Industrial Revolution the carbon dioxide levels had never been higher than 290 parts per million despite going in and out of eight ice ages. It was able to establish that the CO2 parts per million correlated very closely to temperature changes. It also found that the parts per million had never increased faster than 30 ppm in 1,000 years.

Parts per million are now currently around 413. In 2009 the parts per million had increased by 30 in just 17 years. In the last 10 years they have gone up by another 27ppm.

However you look at it that is a significant, and accelerating, climate deviation from long-term trends.

You can then look at what is happening now and we see that 2018 was a record year for global carbon emissions and we have just had the hottest June global temperatures on record.

Some negative comment has been made about school children’s protests. As an OAP I feel that the section of the populace who have the most right to be concerned about climate change is those young people who are going to inherit the world, in whatever form it may take.

Irrespective of people’s individual views on whether climate change is real or not, temperature records are being broken across the world year on year and the trend is accelerating. There is, therefore, undoubtedly a risk that our children and grandchildren will have to live in a world much hotter than at present.

In view of the level of impact that may be seen in the future, surely that risk should be managed now. There is no point getting to 2030, 2040, or 2050 and then saying “alright, it is real”.

By that stage it would be way too late to be able to do anything about it. I don’t know about anyone else but I’m not happy to submit my children and grandchildren to that risk.

Tom Wilkinson

Arnside