Scientists must engage more
Sir: Arguments over nuclear energy, stolen emails from the University of East Anglia and allegations about flawed climate data have indeed split the green movement (‘The global warming guerrillas’, 6 February). But sceptics mustn’t get too excited. The revelations alter nothing. The centuries-old climate science behind the greenhouse effect of gases, such as carbon dioxide, is indisput-able. The world is still warming and humanity is still mostly to blame. ‘Climategate’ should not be seen as a lapse in climate science but a failure to implement the rigorous procedures that ensure only substantiated evidence is published. The IPCC must recover from its embarrassment, get a grip and re-double its efforts to show that the evidence for human-induced climate change is real and that globally co-ordinated action on mitigation and adaptation is urgent. This will require greater openness and a willingness on the part of scientists to engage with the public and the media.
Nick Reeves
London WC1
Sir: What the global warmers relish in the subconscious depths of their being is the power which they must acquire to save the planet. For such temperaments, it had been a terrible blow when the ignorant populace ceased to believe in hellfire. Then the collapse of socialism shattered the dream of establishing utopia by decree. Just when all seemed lost, however, ecology rode to the rescue, proposing a new hell on earth, which naught but tyranny could forfend. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. How dare the plebs insist on accurate science?
Arthur Benbow
Dundee
Rewriting history
Sir: It is a shame that Rian Malan’s brilliant and astute tribute to F.W. de Klerk for ending apartheid (‘F.W. de Klerk: Africa’s hero’, 6 February) is marred by his straying into Middle Eastern politics. He contrasts the white South Africans’ seizing the opportunities presented by the end of the Cold War with the Israelis, whom, he says, were also then ‘presented with a fleeting chance to make peace from a position of power’ but, unlike de Klerk, ‘they dug in their heels, refusing to make the painful concessions necessary’.
Such rewriting of history should not be allowed to go unchecked. In the early 1990s, Israel embraced the opportunity opened up by the Oslo peace process; Israel’s prime minister shook hands with Israel’s hitherto deadly enemy, Yasser Arafat, almost as soon as Arafat had indicated he no longer insisted on Israel’s destruction; and at the culmination of the process at Camp David in 2000 Israel offered Arafat exactly what the international community had always said would bring Israel peace: withdrawal from virtually all of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the establishment of a Palestinian state there, and shared sovereignty in Jerusalem. Arafat’s response was not just to reject this offer, but to unleash a wave of terror attacks deliberately aimed at killing and maiming Israeli citizens (the so-called second intifada) perpetrated by Arafat’s Fatah as well as by Hamas. In 2005, in another push for peace, Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip, which included the painful measures of dismantling Jewish settlements and removing the settlers. Again the Palestinian response was not peace, but the election of a Hamas government opposed to any peace with Israel, and rocket attacks from Gaza on towns and villages within Israel’s pre-1967 borders, again targeted at civilians.
Malan rightly observes that de Klerk’s offer of friendship was ‘accepted with a measure of grace’. Israel was not so lucky in the responses to its concessions. It is utterly perverse to blame Israel for this terrible misfortune.
Michael Grenfell
London NW11
Mrs Eddy’s works
Sir: While Christopher Hitchens predictably feels that ‘the Christian Science classics of Mary Baker Eddy’ constitute ‘a trashy recommendation’ from J.D. Salinger (Washington Notebook, 6 February), Mark Twain was more equivocal than he suggests. Twain criticised the Christian Science healing practice laid out in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures and its author, Eddy, but also made beautiful comments about both.
For those of us who have been helped and healed time and again over a period of decades by the ideas in Science and Health, one can only say if it is trash, give me more.
Tony Lobl
Christian Science Committees on Publication, London SW14
Bring back the Microwriter
Sir: Thanks, Wiki Man, for recalling the name of that brilliant 1980s tool the Microwriter (30 January). Now, can a reader who knows who owns the patent or blueprints to the genius machine kindly get them to update and manufacture the thing again? Fast. Put me down for one, or several. To be able again to ‘type’ happily away with one hand anytime, anywhere — in car, in bed, in restaurants, in bored meetings, with no wife, CEO or other such person realising what you’re doing and getting all stroppy, the way they do. Make it simpler, lighter, cleverer — waterproof would be good — and able to transmit into any device. Forget Job’s screen-tappings, forget voice recognition. The best we have now is two thumbs on a Blackberry, which gives you headaches, causes you to walk into lampposts, maddens wives, etc. Our computers now give us far more output than we can ever digest, when actually it is better input that we need. Bring back the write-anywhere, stealth Microwriter now.
Tony Laithwaite
Bordeaux
Major mistake
Sir: Chris Nancollas really cannot be allowed to get away with his defence of John Major (Letters, 3 February), especially where he says ‘his management of the economy and his dealings with Europe were sound, unspectacular and effective’. Major admitted that the principal plank of his economic policy was the Exchange Rate Mechanism. Many of us warned that this was unsustainable, but were rubbished. Major was fortunate that sterling’s ignoble exit from the system was five months after the 1992 election, otherwise he would have lost. Having seen his economic policy fail in the most visible manner, he did not resign but allowed his sceptical chancellor to take the rap — hardly the act of a decent man.
If Mr Nancollas feels that he has no one to vote for now, imagine what it was like for us then, almost certainly a majority in the country, in April 1992 when all three major political parties supported the Maastricht Treaty.
Tim Hedges
Rome
What if?
Sir: Alistair Horne (Letters, 3 February) wonders what would have happened if Churchill — assuming that he was no longer on the backbenches at the time — had intervened to prevent the German re-occupation of the Rhineland in 1936. I have often thought about this, and I have a nasty feeling that, had such a thing been done, America under Roosevelt would have reacted in exactly the way that Eisenhower did in relation to Suez in 1956, and with the same result: Britain and France would have been hung out to dry, Hitler would have continued on his merry way, and the rest of the world (including the USA) would come to regret the consequences, too late.
John Hart
Malvern
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