Madam, - Your Editorial of December 13th on climate change and the Kyoto Treaty merits further comment. An illuminating counterpoint is the debate on climate change during the 1970s, which has sadly been forgotten or overlooked in the recent discussions.
The terms of the debate then were similar and scientific opinion was reported widely to be "unanimous", as we are told it is now. However, one difference stands out. In 1974, when the US National Science Board made its prediction about the future temperature of the globe, it predicted not global warming, but global cooling.
Climate change is not new, nor has it been proven that human activity has more than a marginal impact on temperatures. Global temperatures now are lower than they were for most of the medieval period, to take one example.
Even from industrial times the evidence is very mixed: temperatures worldwide cooled for a number of decades after the second World War, before beginning to increase again.
Not only does the Kyoto Treaty rest on shaky science, it rests on bad reasoning. According to its own model of projection, which improbably assumes that all signatories fulfil their obligations, the Kyoto Treaty only delays the purported rise in global temperatures between now and 2100 by a mere six years, an almost immeasurable difference. What is much more measurable is the cost of Kyoto compliance, conservatively estimated to be at least $100 billion a year. This is a very high price to make a very small difference in combating a phenomenon that may well not exist.
Common sense requires that the Government reconsider its commitment to Kyoto. - Yours, etc.,
RICHARD WAGHORNE, The Freedom Institute, Waterloo Road, Dublin 4.