I WISH people like Rob Meggs (HAS, June 6) would check their facts. Yes, climate change is happening. If it wasn’t we’d be living on a dead planet.

No, scientific evidence does not overwhelmingly support it being man-made.

He should read some of Canadian journalist Lawrence Solomon’s profiles of the three dozen scientists of “great eminence”, all recognised leaders in their fields, many of them involved in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) who question the IPCC conclusions.

Evidence, not rhetoric, also shows that oil companies do not finance the “deniers” because they want to protect their “vested interests” by improving their green credentials.

As for using emotive terms like “crank” and “denier”, that is the usual response of those lacking facts.

We need to research ways to cope with inevitable climate change, not focus on economically destructive pogroms, which will lead to impoverishment.

Let’s put the wasted cash into the research and development of flood defences, food production, water and securing a supply of cheap, possibly renewable, plentiful energy, which is vital to our nation’s economic and social well-being. That’s the no-brainer, Mr Meggs.

Dave Brothers, UK Independence Party County Durham, Hartlepool.

I CANNOT let Rob Meggs’ letter (HAS, June 6) go without some comment.

There are thousands of well respected scientists, climate specialists, power engineers all publishing rebuttals of the global warming juggernaut, but they find it difficult to get their thoughts and conclusions into main line broadcast or print media (with the honourable exception of The Northern Echo), since the perceived wisdom is that climate change is a fact.

The trouble is that the first lie is hardest to refute. The head of the IPCC has published unreviewed data, and the British end of this organisation was found to have tampered with emails, and withheld or altered data.

It took a lorry driver to get Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth banned from schools because of the factual inaccuracies.

In the report on green industries last week (Echo Business, June 1), two lines stood out.

First, the assertion by a manufacturer of wind turbines that they are efficient. By any engineering criteria, a device which produces 20 per cent of its rated output cannot be called efficient.

Second, the comment from Renewable Energy Foundation that wind power profits could only be bettered by an illegal enterprise. That is what I would call a no brainer.

Dennis Clark, Billingham