The climate change fight
Mark Lynas is quite wrong when he claims that the scientific community’s consensus on global warming is similar to one on nuclear power and GM crops (20 March). There is significant opposition to nuclear power amongst a broad range of eminent scientists, from the physical, biological and medical scientists, and this has been the case for decades. We are not significantly closer to solving the problem of radioactive waste than we were in the 1950s, and as Lucens, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima have shown, nuclear “accidents” must be expected.
The same is true of GM crops. Evidence is now emerging of high residues of pesticides in GM crops, in addition to an extensive history of contamination of other crops.
In each of these cases, just as in the case of climate change, the driving force is the quest for profit, regardless of the (unintended) consequences and costs.
The common thread is that we live in a finite natural world and have embraced an ideology that requires permanent growth, something that is patently a physical impossibility. If stating that makes me an “extremist”, so be it. Scientific facts are not decided by polls.
I Bokor
Armidale, NSW, Australia
• As a mediator working with conflict in groups and organisations, my job is to offer disputants a neutral framing – a description of the issue that expands their thinking, promotes curiosity and offers a safe space for examining divergent perspectives. Respect for disputants and, strangely, the conflict itself, is key to creating a safe space for a productive conversation.
Within such a framing, needs can be addressed, objective criteria brought to bear on the discussion, and values mutually heard and respected. For proponents of market-based solutions and those in favour of more community-based models to have a productive conversation as opposed to a shouting match, a safe space grounded in respect needs to be offered.
If Lynas truly wishes to encourage people climbing “out of their trenches” and “working together” he is going about it in a strange way. Calling one or both sides “extremist” is hardly likely to yield anything productive. Rather than promoting dialogue as Lynas claims, it suggests a desire to push one side entirely out of the space of politically acceptable discourse. We associate the word “extremist” with blowing up installations and taking hostages. Now suddenly this term is being applied to people who question capitalism as a viable model in the era of climate change.
Ana Simeon
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
• Climate change and the drive to seek refuge are indeed not new. Not only is the primary driving force now one of human making, but for the first time in history we know what’s around the corner. Older societies in the Levant, on Pacific islands, in the US south-west and on the Yucatan that faced drought, sea-level rise, and other climate-induced changes never saw what was coming. We do. Thanks to science.
Antony R Berger
Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Canada
Dalai Lama’s Tibetan stance
Alan Williams-Key writes that the Dalai Lama is “an advocate for an independent Tibet” (Reply, 20 March). That is not correct. What the Dalai Lama has been advocating for the past 35 years is the well-named Middle Way policy.
In 1979, the late Chinese paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, proposed to the Dalai Lama that “except independence, all other issues can be resolved through negotiations”. This was immediately welcomed by the Dalai Lama who, after consulting with many people, changed the policy of restoring Tibet’s independence to that of the Middle Way approach which seeks genuine autonomy, within the framework of the People’s Republic of China, for all Tibetans living in the three traditional provinces of Tibet. To date, the response from the Chinese leadership has been to label the Dalai Lama as a “violent separatist”.
George Farley
Merricks Beach, Victoria, Australia
UK surveillance oversight
The article concerning surveillance laws needing a total overhaul (20 March) reports that the prime minister, David Cameron, made a statement saying that the intelligence services commissioner, Sir Mark Waller, would be given “statutory powers of oversight of use of bulk personal datasets”. Is it too much to expect that a man educated at Eton and Oxford would know that an oversight is defined in the Oxford dictionary not only as: “supervision”, but also as “omission or failure to see or notice”, and that this second definition is the one that is most used in modern parlance?
Felicity Oliver
Ostermundigen, Switzerland
Humour about Quebec
I found Mali Ilse Paquin’s piece about Sugar Sammy: Quebec’s ‘federal clown’ (20 March) both entertaining and informative, but the adverse reactions of some Québécois to his humour is curious when one considers the immense popularity of Michel Beaudet’s Tete A Claques animated sketches in which the characters spoke the most hilarious Franglais in a stereotypical Quebec accent. Soon after its launch in 2006 Tete A Claques received 1m hits a day.
Perhaps the difference is that the Québécois tolerate, and even appreciate, self-deprecatory humour by a native son, but find similar humour by a foreigner, although born and raised in their midst, to be offensive. Pity!
George Bruce Levine
Ottawa, Canada
Australia’s refugee problem
Thank you, Guardian Weekly, for continuing to shed a light on the dark place which is Australia’s treatment of refugees (Australia’s turning back of asylum boats a ‘moral failure’, 20 March). While most Australians do not read the Weekly but instead the Murdoch newspapers that follow the government’s hard line in demonising refugees and presenting them as a potential security threat, a large number are ashamed by the cruel and “illegal” policy as defined by international law.
An organisation called We’re Better Than This (wbttaus.org) was started by some prominent Australians and deserves support.
The distinguished QC Julian Burnside, who has fought tirelessly for refugee rights, has stated that Australians have less to fear from a few desperate people fleeing for their lives than from a government that is prepared to lie, act in secret and have little regard for international opinion.
Margaret Wilkes
Cottesloe, Western Australia
Briefly
• Your headline Richard III comes home at last (27 March) is provocative. Many people believed his remains should have been returned to York Minster, since he was the last king of the House of York, instead of being re-interred in the cathedral of the city that had used his bones as hardcore for a car park.
But if Leicester could not provide an appropriate geographical context for the event, they could surely have attempted to provide a historical one. I had expected at the very least that one of the horses drawing the hearse would have had a placard round its neck, “Sorry I’m late.”
Alan Williams-Key
Madrid, Spain
• Jonathan Powell’s question to why we don’t have the strong and inspirational world leaders we all yearn for (20 March), is answered a few pages back in Oliver Burkeman’s This column will change your life, where he says that evolution “is all about mediocrity”, not a “progression towards greatness”, thus implying that the terrible are, if we’re lucky, replaced by the “sufficiently non-terrible”.
Richard Orlando
Westmount, Quebec, Canada
• The review of Steve Fraser’s The Age of Acquiescence (13 March) refers to “a limpid legislative response” as if that were a bad thing. I wish my representatives would quit their obfuscation and give a limpid response now and then.
Lee Hartman
Carbondale, Illinois, US
• Oliver Burkeman (13 March) might find it simpler to attend a Quaker meeting to achieve inner peace and his $30 could be used for a better purpose.
Pat Stapleton
Beaumont du Ventoux, France
• If Pope Francis did describe childless women as selfish, as Garry Wills claims in his The future of the Catholic Church with Pope Francis (27 March), this surely prompts the question: “How many children does Pope Francis have”?
Dino Bressan
Heidelberg, Victoria, Australia
Email letters for publication to weekly.letters@theguardian.com including a full postal address and a reference to the article. Submissions may be edited for publication
