What Toowoomba residents think of climate change debate

YOUR SAY: Climate change has sparked some strong opinions among Toowoomba readers this week.

Climate change protesters are seen along Princes Bridge, Melbourne, Saturday, September 14, 2019. Extinction Rebellion activists have blocked Princes Bridge, demanding that the Australian government addresses climate change. (AAP Image/James Ross) NO ARCHIVING. Picture: JAMES ROSS

Letter 1 - Verbal garbage

RESPONDING to 'Boris' text 16/10 who says that Alison Fearnley and I shall have no credibility unless we discard everything in our lives provided by coal.

The recent cacophony of letters promulgating this puerile argument in The Chronicle has become deafening.

When Al Gore presented The Inconvenient Truth he was berated for using a private jet. The premise that anyone who has not attained the zen of a carbon-neutral footprint and advocates climate action is a hypocrite, is a hexadactyl argument.

Just because I don't live in a cave and club my evening meal to death does not make me a climate hypocrite.

Advocates for better stewardship of our planet, like myself, are not asking you to live a carbon-neutral lifestyle, they are seeking systemic change from governments, large institutions and energy companies to abandon our current trajectory of fossil fuel usage in order to preserve our life support system.

Your throwaway line that, "The IPCC was discredited long ago" is simply verbal garbage.

How long ago and who discredited it and why? Non-scientists have the luxury of expressing opinions as though they were facts without the burden of referencing their source.

Humanity is currently locked into 200 years of collective fossil fuel infrastructure that emanated from the industrial revolution in the late 18th century.

We are all locked into the fossil-fuel (fool) energy system.

If we do not engage in an energy revolution right now, the erratic weather we are starting to see now at just 1 degree of warming will continue to escalate.

GEOFF CASTLE, Toowoomba

Letter 2 - Physics, not politics

MR FRIEND (TC, 18/10) seems to forget climate change is about physics not politics.

All levels of government need to drastically increase their response to this crisis, and everyone whether you vote left or right will be affected.

If you don't like me as the messenger, perhaps you could listen to the Australian Medical Association who last month declared that "climate change is a health emergency."

President Dr Tony Bartone said that "the evidence is in on climate change and it is irrefutable" and said rising temperatures, heatwaves and extreme weather events will cause increased injury and mortality, as well as food insecurity.

He also quoted the World Health Organisation which in 2015 rated climate change as "the greatest threat to global health in the 21st Century."

Mr Friend, guess what? Average people want to know their governments are doing all they can to ensure a safe future for themselves and their children.

ALISON FEARNLEY, Toowoomba

Letter 2 - Climate debate

ALISON Fearnley, Toowoomba; I'm glad you felt empowered by taking time out from your obviously not too busy day to strike and march against climate change however your actions and those of some other 330,000 people across Australia (which may I add equates to a whopping 1.1% of our population) were, to say the very least, misguided and basically a complete waste of time.

Scientists world wide are now stepping away from the idea of man-made climate change and the notion that we are destroying the planet with our carbon emissions.

Stand on your own two feet and think for yourself don't just pile on the climate alarmism bandwagon because a few other people in your city are doing it.

The earth is 5.2 billion years old to say that mankind has irrefutably broken/destroyed it in the last 200 years is absolutely ludicrous.

The science is out, climate change exists only in the minds of those who can't see reality.

KEV MCKAY, Toowoomba

Originally published as What Toowoomba residents think of climate change debate