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Climate change
OpinionLetters

Doubts remain on human agency in climate change

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Participants look at a screen showing a world map with climate anomalies during the World Climate Change Conference 2015, near Paris in December that year. Photo: Reuters
Letters
Your correspondent Lee Sai-ming, from the Hong Kong Observatory, rejected Mr G. Bailey’s sensible points on climate change (“Human influence through greenhouse gas emissions proved”, January 5). But Mr Lee does not appear to have read the report he refers to.

The last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2013 states, in its technical section of 78 pages, that human involvement in climate change can only be shown by mathematical models.

It then goes on to say that the 100-plus models generated by the scientists did not predict the slowdown in the increase of temperature in the period 1998 to 2013.

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If the only way to prove the human connection is the modelling process and the models cannot predict, surely there is some doubt in most clear-thinking people’s minds about the connection between humans and climate change.

The climate scientists want us to give up driving fossil-fuelled cars and travelling on trains and planes. This much is known.

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But what is not emphasised is that we are not supposed to grow rice or rear cattle. Also not mentioned in the IPCC report is the need to stop making steel and cement, which are huge users of coal and other fossil fuels.

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