The letter headed “Always been bad weather” (Andrew Lea, March 28) highlights our political leaders’ greatly misplaced thinking. To confirm his assumptions, scientific evidence shows that for thousands of years, the average global temperature has varied up and down by about 5 degrees Celsius.

Such temperature changes would have commenced at the start and the end of glacial periods but would each have taken about 5,000 years to complete.

However, forecasters are stating we will experience an increase of 6 degrees Celsius by the end of this century. It will bring an extraordinary increase in the frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events.

The problem is not whether global warming is occurring; it’s how unusually rapidly it is doing so. Average temperature and carbon dioxide are both rising exponentially.

It’s surely not a coincidence that having taken all of time for us humans to reach a population of 1.6 billion, we have multiplied it to over 6 billion in the last 100 years.

This is not to mention our vastly increased rate of energy consumption per person. The present rate of change is alarming since we now have given ourselves hardly any time to protect ourselves from the effects of these rapid changes without a superhuman global effort.

What our ancestors had was time to make changes – 6,000 years on average.

According to the Worldwatch Institute, a non-profit think tank, “If we cannot stabilize climate and we cannot stabilize population, there is not an eco-system on Earth that we can save”.

Mike Joslin

Garfield Avenue

Dorchester