About half the world’s population gets their daily energy needs from the burning of wood.

Wood is a renewable energy source but we are burning it faster than it can grow back.

One of the problems that I have with any debate or discussion about global warming is that we, the general public have to rely on information supplied by the media: newspapers, television, and the Internet.

I know that these organisations are in the business of making money for their shareholders, however, in most reports about climate change we have photographs or film showing coal fired power stations and the billowing clouds of CO2 gases polluting the atmosphere.

The problem is that these billowing clouds in most cases are nothing but hot air, steam, H2O, from water-cooling towers.

If the media are unable to distinguish between a chimneystack and a water-cooling tower, then the public is being provided with false and misleading information and consequently is being prohibited from making a valued assessment of the true facts about global warming.

Just ask these media organisations to print or show photographs of nuclear power stations and you will see the same water-cooling towers at these locations.

Estimates indicate that all known oil reserves could be 90 per cent depleted by 2040.

Coal reserves are much more plentiful, coal is a highly polluting fuel because it produces S02 when it burns.

These are two ways designed to reduce these emissions, desulphurization and coal gasification.

We have been told that with temperatures rising sea levels will increase, an increase in rainfall and flooding in some areas and drought in others, heat waves and wildfires, crop failures, contagious diseases and water wars.

I think that this message is getting through.

One of the problems we have with climate change sceptics is the recurring regurgitating of a hypothesis that has been disproved time and time again.

They behave like one-eyed supporters at a football game and bring nothing to solving a problem.

We have greasy wheels in South Australia clamouring for more water in Lake Alexandrina so that frogs can jump around and other wilderness radicals demanding the Snowy River have half a metre of water flowing under the Princes Highway at Orbost.

While all along the River Murray system, food processing factories and canneries have closed their doors.

Orchards, vineyards and wineries have been deprived of water and thousands of jobs lost.

And the land has no value without water rights.

The problem we face is not all about curtailing greenhouse emissions but also about eliminating those already in the atmosphere.

It’s all about atoms, molecules, and ions, thermodynamics and electrochemistry.

Ivor Williams

Brogo

Not science derived

I respond to the three correspondents (BDN 29/1) who responded to my letter published the Friday before.

Before responding in detail there is a phrase frequently bandied around in the climate change debate I wish to challenge which is “The science of climate change”.

I challenge this because climate change is not derived from science.

Science is a number of natural laws and principles which can be repeatedly demonstrated.

For instance gravity can be repeatedly demonstrated every time you drop something.

Climate change is based on a huge series of one-off observations which cannot be repeated therefore it is not science.

It is actually an exercise in statistics.

Now there is nothing wrong in this as we use statistics continually in our daily lives but science and statistics are two entirely different academic disciplines and should be recognised as such.

From science we derive facts which are truths which cannot be disputed but from statistics we derive opinions and there are as many opinions as there are people.

Opinions are believed or disbelieved.

If you believe one then you believe it by faith and this is the basis of all religion.

Therefore climate change and your attitude and approach to it is an article of your religion.

It is very interesting that my original letter and the letters of my three respondents have all approached climate change according to the respective faiths of the writers and not from science.

Rachel Colombo wrote me a poem about Gaia, the earth goddess, showing her approach is that of a New Age pantheist.

Dona Eaton seems to be a believer in environmental sustainability, while David Grainger denounces those who would have us worship at the environmental altar and make sacrifices to this new atheistic environmental religion.

He approaches the issue from a Christian viewpoint like myself.

One point I challenge is Dona Eaton’s reference to the apocalypse that is the total destruction of the earth at the end of time.

She seems to think we can avoid this.

We cannot.

The apocalypse is inevitable regardless of what we say or try to do.

There is good established science to say this will occur.

I refer to the Second Law of Thermodynamics or the Law of Entropy which has been established science now for 130 years, which says that all systems will eventually run down, fall apart and disintegrate.

We see this going on around us all the time but people have difficulty in accepting that this law applies to the entire universe which of course includes planet earth.

As I said in my first letter, climate change is a symptom of an ageing earth or in terms of the above law – entropy or the wearing out process.

It is inevitable and we cannot fix it.

We just have to learn to live with it.

I find it ironic that climate changers conveniently ignore this piece of real established science for I have never seen it factored into the so called “Science of Climate Change”.

The only ray of hope in all this is Jesus Christ who has promised those who love Him, forgiveness of their sin and a place with Him for eternity in the New Heavens and the New Earth He will create for those who love Him.

Roger Jones

Bemboka