Climate remains a fact of life that is determined by nature

Paul Kelly highlights the futility in the climate debate and the fact that name calling will achieve nothing (“Climate calculus under pressure”, 20/4). Climate change is a fact of life determined by nature and destined to remain so. What has not been determined is to what extent, if any, human activity contributes to its severity and therefore what we can do about it.

Reports by economists assess the costs and benefits of what may happen in a particular scenario, while entrepreneurs promote the use of carbon credits from which they stand to gain the most. Using a carrot from one part of the globe as a stick to persuade another is an exercise with potentially zero benefit.

Kelly quotes Bill Shorten saying the debate has been “dysfunctional, dishonest and divisive” for a decade. He might add that the lack of an energy policy has produced a picture of disinterest and neglect by all parties.

Shorten is also quoted as saying “there will never be enough figures to satisfy the climate sceptics”. Wrong. There have been too many figures based on arbitrary observation and delusional guesswork. If global warming is the correct metric of damage and danger, tell us how much warming is due to emissions. Then we would have a target for an appropriate and measured response.

Derek Fern, Box Hill, Vic

Venezuelan warning

Even if the alarmists have got it right — and we should always be wary of modelling — Australia’s 1.3 per cent contribution towards global carbon dioxide emissions would make their call to sacrifice industry, farms, jobs and living standards a futile gesture.

What appear to be tiny cuts to economic growth amount to tens of billions of dollars and sit uneasily with boosts to spending on health and education. Shorten’s slippery inclusion of shovelling cash offshore for carbon credits to balance the equation is merely a return to the discredited nostrums of 2009. Starving Venezuela is a warning for any resource-rich country flirting with socialist governance.

John Morrissey, Hawthorn, Vic

Glimmer of hope for unis

On reading the excellent article by Graham Lloyd on Peter Ridd’s sacking by James Cook University and the resulting Federal Court case — and then Mark Bauerlein’s equally good article, on “traditional and identitarian approaches” to the teaching of English classics — one can only feel that at last there is a glimmer of hope that universities may once again return to be the bastions of free thought and speech that I was lucky enough to experience in the 1970s.

Complacency may be the norm in the general population where every three years we get to do more than just abuse the ABC’s reportage and actually have our say at the ballot box.

But I question why thousands of university hope lecturers and tutors continue to sit on their hands and not speak out against the dumbing down of their institutions by the Left, who use uncivil discourse instead of reasoned argument to damn anyone who disagrees with their viewpoint.

Political correctness, is the blight of censorship by those people who make the most noise, while the timorous majority remain so.

Michael Flannery, Cowra, NSW

Anchor for the soul

Greg Sheridan’s article made for delightful reading (“Resilience of belief in Christ’s resurrection based on its veracity”, 20/4). Our inclination to remove God from the bigger picture of our civil life has not made us any less anxious about what lies beyond this existence.

In these times, more than ever, we need an anchor for the soul. While we rightfully acknowledge the abhorrent abuses at times in history, no other ideological creed has so positively transformed patterns of human behaviour than the Christian faith.

Peter Waterhouse, Craigieburn, Vic