You mean there's something even WORSE than an "America lover"?!

RETURNING from Scotland the other night, by coincidence I shared a train seat for two hours with a young guy doing a PHD in methane capture financed on the back of global warming hysteria.

So far he had collected a degree (in geography) and an MSc (in environmental science) – and – had never worked in the real world – but in spite of this deficiency he believed he knew all the answers.

He was a likeable guy and we didn't fall out, but his arguments further convinced me that Richard Hopwood (Yorkshire Post, December 13) is right and that we may be witnessing a rerun of the King's New Clothes.

Peer pressure and the beliefs of professors and acclaimed experts indoctrinating impressionable young minds and eager to shout down genuine sceptics as deniers, or world wreckers, or capitalists, or America lovers or worse.

It's not happening

After Kyoto, where half of the participants were skeptics, the politicians purged the draft of all dissenting opinions and blandly declared there was a general consensus except for a few dissenters.

The pattern hasn't changed since--except for a few irresponsible dissenters, everybody agrees. Susan Martinuk exposed the manipulations at the IPCC and elsewhere. The formula used to calculate the "disastrous temperature increase" is based on biased assumptions. Historic climate fluctuations were ignored. The "hockey stick" diagram Al Gore used is based on manipulated data to create the illusion that the temperature was constant until recently.

Bernhard Sleumer, Calgary

Memories, stats of Christmases past - Breaking News, New Brunswick, Canada

In a website put up by Environment Canada, a section headed “Climate Data Online” gives daily weather information dating back, in some cases, to 1840. Sussex, for example, began reporting data 1897. What sort of weather did we have on Christmas Day ‘way back? It was really cold, right? Actually, between 1897 and 1904 there were three years when the mean temperature on Christmas rose into positive territory and the average temperature for the eight years was only minus 5.4 Celsius. 1899 was the only one of those years with precipitation on Christmas and that year 3.3 millimetres of rain fell.

Things have been a lot different these last years, right? Well, the eight years between 1997 and 2004 saw only two years with the mean temperature above zero and the average Christmas temperature was minus 5.375 Celsius.