I WRITE to you as a “berserker”, Peter Mullen’s latest term of abuse for anyone prepared to accept the evidence of climate change, i.e. the vast majority of scientists and advisors worldwide who are qualified to make a judgement (Echo, May 7).

The headlines on his column – Blinkered view – exemplifies his views exactly.

He tells us that global temperatures have remained constant for the last 15 years but, with his blinkered view, ignores the fact that for the previous 100 years, temperatures have risen steadily in line with carbon dioxide emissions.

He also fails to notice that the last few years have seen the highest average temperatures worldwide for millennia.

It has been much reported on that Arctic ice has been disappearing at an alarming rate during the last decade, and the increase in heat may well have gone into melting Arctic ice rather than raising air temperatures, as a result of the underlying complexity of the earth’s climate.

Eric Gendle, Middlesbrough.

I RECALL the opening of Calder Hall power station (now known as Sellafield) in the 1950s.

This made Britain the world leader in the use of nuclear power for peaceful purposes. The enormous amount of energy available from the splitting of the atom promised plentiful electricity for all for centuries.

Indeed,we were promised “electricity too cheap to meter”.

Officials said it would take a few years for the technology to be developed, after which power would be so cheap, we could dispense with electric meters and just pay our connection charge to the electricity company and draw as much as we wanted.

All this came back to me as I read Peter Mullin’s column about fracking for shale gas.

Does this sound familiar to anybody else?

Martin Forester, Spennymoor.