Ed,

‘Re Oscar Tamsen’s letter (CVI 28/09/22) and subsequent correspondence’

Numbers are never irrelevant, and ignoring history is to foolishly abandon important knowledge. The question needs to be raised, why anyone would advance an argument of numerical irrelevance, whilst simultaneously using numbers to support a contrary opinion.

1860 is a historically important number, the year temperature monitoring stations finally reached global network status, and coincidently, the end of the most recent cooling period, the Little Ice Age.

10,000 years before present is another, the period wherein significant temperature extremes have been seven warming with a mean of +1.4degC and +2.1decC maximum, and six cooling with -1.2degC and -1.6degC mean and minimum, respectively. Today’s global average is very close to the mean of the last 10,000 years, actually marginally on the cooler side.

At the Glasgow Climate Summit. a group of eminent climate scientists presented to the IPCC a petition headed ‘There is No Climate Emergency.’ Similar correspondence has been raised by scientists at every previous climate summit. Confirmation is as close as a quick perusal of the historically accurate figures above.

Unprecedented, meaning never before, is frequently misused in place of ‘in living memory’ or possibly in some cases as ‘since 1860’.