Dear Editor

I wish to commend the Ross Gazette on your thoughtful coverage of how we can, and must, develop Climate Emergency policies.  Our impressive school age students, along with your young reporter Aliya Shibli, have been roundly patronised in last week’s edition by at least two writers. Both espoused prejudiced climate-denial tactics, and sought to confuse by banal rhetoric, in place of apologising for the political intransigence of the last 30 years.

Since the mid-1980s and the early global temperature computer models, climate scientists and NGOs have warned that this emergency was due.  This led to the signing of UN protocols for Climate Change, and for Biodiversity, at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992.

The predictions were wrong; the impacts have come about far earlier than projected. 

Our generation (and I presume your correspondents Peter Martin and Steve Davis to be schooled in the 1970s) were fully aware of the risks, and the end-game of extinctions. As one John Kyrle student’s placard summarised the issue “Please Stop Melting My Future”.

By denigrating the debate to a cry for ‘balance and objectivity’, Davis and Martin are exposed as apologists for our society’s decline in a once-proud democratic process.  I say surely such voices have reached their end.

Davis further besmirched the opinion of 32 Herefordshire GPs (September 25th ). As they said, I too urge  government and media to “respond immediately and proportionately”.  This phalanx of the older generation has chosen to ignore the facts and now advocate curtailing protesters’ ability to speak Truth to Power.   

Chris Bligh

Dymock