The science shows its wrong to dismiss the UK’s emissions as ‘trivial’ - Yorkshire Post Letters

Charles Wardrop (The Yorkshire Post, January 4) offers the tired argument that the UK’s 1.3 per cent share of global emissions is ‘trivial’, suggesting that efforts to decarbonise are ‘virtue signalling’. I wonder whether Mr Wardrop would accept the same excuse from a child dropping litter?

The UK isn't small either. It is the 17th largest CO2 emitter of 195 nations, and that’s before accounting for the 40 per cent of our carbon footprint arising from the goods we now have made overseas. What's more, because we led the industrial revolution, the UK is the 5th largest contributor to the current excess CO2 in our atmosphere. What happened to taking responsibility?

Mr Wardrop’s letter then descends into unsubstantiated nonsense. He suggests decarbonising won’t affect climate, challenging the vast body of scientific work summarised in the UN’s IPCC reports. He makes the ludicrous claim that electrically powered alternatives to fossil technology are less efficient and dependable than ‘the real thing’. Again absolutely without a shred of evidence. Spoiler alert: there is none. Quite the opposite.

That’s why studies like Oxford University’s ‘Decarbonising the Energy System’ demonstrate £ trillions of savings, showing that the faster we go, the more we’ll save.

Scientists could not be clearer about the urgent need for rapid decarbonisation at an unprecedented rate.

United Nations head António Guterres warns we are ‘on track to an unlivable world’. We can’t afford delay caused by the spread of climate disinformation, lessening the urgency to act, whether deliberate or just embarrassingly misinformed.

This is now a matter of the survival of our civilization, and I ask news editors to consider raising the quality bar for letters by requiring claims to be backed by links to relevant evidence-based articles - a discipline which itself would save much time-wasting.