4:54pm Tuesday 9th February 2010
AS an IT professional with over 30 years experience, I take exception to Des Morgan's casual dismissal of what he inaccurately terms the ‘Millennium Bug’. Thanks to the foresight and hard work of many thousands of people over more than a decade, essential services such as banking, insurance, pensions and benefits continued with scarcely a hitch as 1999 gave way to 2000. This was a magnificent success story, and ill-informed commentators could learn much from it.
In Mr Morgan's world, facts and logic appear to matter less than opinion. On July 24 2009 he informed us that "I suspect the answer is that the Americans didn't go to the moon". More recently (December 4) he claimed, without a shred of evidence, that tidal activity is a cause of climate change.
On January 20, Des Morgan accused Chris Shepherd of engaging in silly and childish insults. Could this be the same Des Morgan who has repeatedly used the term "climate change zealots" to describe people who, unlike Mr Morgan, can accept that annually pouring billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels must pose a significant threat to the biosphere?
Finally, there is an automatic assumption that "climate change is big business". The really big business, providing much of the funding behind the climate change denial industry, is of course the production of oil, gas and coal. If there is a climate change scandal, it is the willingness of naïve or lazy journalists and commentators to accept the frequently ludicrous claims made by organisations which have a vested interest in the continued over-consumption of fossil fuels.
ANDREW DAY Bydemill Gardens Highworth
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