YOUR VIEWS: Backing for car park charges at Glenmore
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The outrage about suggested parking charges (Strathy, 25 January) is all too predictable and exaggerated but ignores the strong case for management of parking around the Glenmore hotspots.
This is necessary for traffic management, public safety and environmental protection.
The easiest way to manage parking is to prohibit it at peak periods outside car parks – as has been done in the Loch Lomond National Park on the east shore from Balmaha to Rowardennan (seven miles).
Indeed sometimes the whole road is closed – but managed paid-for parking seems a reasonable alternative.
The level of parking charges proposed seems modest by comparison with national parks in England elsewhere and no doubt season tickets could be available at reduced rates for local residents and businesses.
The suggested charges here are unlikely to deter visitors used to visiting other national parks.
In the Lake District one struggles to find a day ticket for less than £12 (unless one is a member of the National Trust) and an annual ticket for all park car parks costs £450!
Last summer in a car park in the Peak District the going rate for a day ticket was £18 - and the park was full.
If any surplus here goes to help the beleaguered Highland Council budget then so much the better.
Peter Mackay
Dunachton Road
Kincraig.
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Increasing UK’s self-sufficiency is important for so many reasons
Dave Morris criticises public funding for agriculture and forestry in the Cairngorms National Park (Strathy letters, January 25).
He suggests the protest of crofters and farmers should be directed at the Scottish Government not the Cairngorms National Park Authority.
Government support to make Britain more self-sufficient in food and forest products was in response to blockades during the world wars last century to prevent our nation importing essential goods that we required.
In 1905 Scotland’s woodlands covered only 4.5% of our land area, only 7% of Britain’s consumption of forest products then came from domestic sources. Much of the food Britain consumed was also imported.
Following government support, by 1984 Britain was estimated to be 78% self-sufficient in food. As it takes between 40 and 120 years for trees in Britain to reach maturity, self-sufficiency in forest products takes longer to achieve.
Around 1990 the break-up of the Soviet Union established countries such as Ukraine that supplied Britain with forest products, fertiliser and some food cheaper than we could produce here.
The attitude of our government changed, why produce here what we can import cheaper from elsewhere?
The war in Ukraine has demonstrated the importance of security of supply of essential goods we consume. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine imported fertiliser prices tripled, wood pellet prices more than doubled.
Being more self-sufficient in the goods and services we consume can provide product security, employment and a workforce skilled in production and processing.
Our economy benefits if our nation produces more and imports less.
Mr Morris criticises organisations planting trees with fencing and mounding at high elevations to obtain carbon credits to offset carbon emissions from carbon emitting industries. Most of these new woodlands established at high elevations will never produce the forest products we consume.
Generating carbon credits does not reduce carbon emitted by these industries. Research by the James Hutton Institute and Aberdeen Universities challenges the claim that these woodlands absorb more carbon from the atmosphere than they emit.
Today around 19% of Scotland’s land area is covered in woodland but the forest products produced per hectare of woodland is in decline. In the Cairngorms National Park there is a presumption in favour of native tree species of local origin.
Woodlands are being established at elevations and locations that will never contribute to the forest products we consume or reduce carbon in our atmosphere over the next 40+ years.
Our economy in the Cairngorms National Park is now dominated by tourism and public sector employment. Britain currently imports 81% of the forest products and around 40% of the food we consume.
We are importing more and producing less food, forest products and energy along with some other products we consume.
As a nation our borrowing is increasing. We import from elsewhere based mainly on price with insufficient regard to security or sustainability of the supply, global biodiversity, net greenhouse gas emissions, human and livestock welfare, or global pollution.
To provide a sustainable and more secure future for the next generation our priorities need to change.
This year 13,111 hectares of new woodland creation has been approved but following a 41% cut in funding by the Scottish Government, there is only sufficient funding to support a further 9,000 hectares of new woodland.
In the 1960s the Forestry Commission would not support new woodlands they believed would not contribute to meeting the demand for forest products we consume.
Perhaps the Scottish Government should consider a similar solution.
Jamie Williamson
Alvie Estate Office
Kincraig.
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Architect’s name is still a mystery
This is to thank readers of the Strathy for their assistance in providing information about the Grampian Hotel in Dalwhinnie.
Unfortunately, nobody seems to know for sure whom its architect was so that remains a mystery.
I have, however, had it confirmed that trying to keep a flat-roofed building in Dalwhinnie wind and watertight was a great challenge.
Professor Bruce Peter
Professor of Design History
The Glasgow School of Art
167 Renfrew Street
Glasgow
G3 6RQ.
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Trust climate experts and not flat-earthers
When I am ill, I go to get advice from a doctor, who will in turn refer me to a specialist if more expert opinion is required.
Similarly, when considering climate change, I turn to the most reliable sources of information – the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which surveys all relevant worldwide research. These provide evidence that ‘decarbonisation could help to stabilise the world’s climate’.
It was Mr Wardrop’s statement that such evidence does not exist (Strathy January 11) that I called out: he may not like the evidence of the IPCC, he may find other evidence, but to claim that the evidence does not exist is simply untrue, and that is a fact, not ‘my opinion’.
When a critical mass of evidence eventually develops on any matter, an opinion or theory becomes accepted as fact – as with evolution, or the earth orbiting the sun.
When these were first generally accepted, there did of course remain some ‘flat-earthers’, who resolutely denied the findings of science.
The same happened with the revelation of the damage to health caused by smoking.
Much of the scepticism was funded by tobacco companies, and there were always some old people who had smoked all their lives, and ‘proved’ smoking was harmless.
Nevertheless the vast majority of people now believe that smoking greatly increases the likelihood of developing lung cancer and other diseases – the science has won.
Likewise with greenhouse gases and climate change – the fossil fuel companies have funded much research in an effort to find anything which might cast doubt on the link between the burning of their fuels and climate change, and in fact have managed to delay effective action by the global community, with the dire results we are now seeing.
Surely it’s past time for the science to be heeded.
P.S. In reply to Neil Bryce, I am far too much of a realist to have any utopian green vision, and share many concerns about the present financing and overseas origin of our wind turbines.
Jim MacEwan
Nethy Bridge.
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Say it isn’t true... but CO2 threat is reality
Last week’s batch of letters from climate science deniers (Strathy, 24th January) merely illustrates the effect of the decades-long misinformation campaign funded by fossil fuel companies in confusing some individuals into believing things that have no basis in reality.
Charles Wardrop, for example, falsely claims ‘CO2 exerts a very minor greenhouse effect, less than five per cent of the total, [...] compared with that of water vapour and clouds, at more than 95 per cent’ and goes on to suggest a literature search to find the source of that misinformation.
I can assure Mr Wardrop that he will not find any scientific source: his claim has no scientific basis whatsoever.
It was never published in a scientific journal: it is an internet myth, endlessly repeated and promulgated by people like himself, who simply want it to be true. But it isn’t.
That false belief did however have a source: professor Bob Carter, an Australian marine geologist and prolific climate science denier, addressing the Melbourne Rotary Club on 15th June 2005 quoted the following about global warming: “95% [...] of this warming is produced by water vapour [...]. The other trace gases contribute 5% [...] of the greenhouse warming, amongst which carbon dioxide corresponds to 3.65% [...]. The human-caused contribution corresponds to about 3% of the total carbon dioxide in the present atmosphere.”
Mr Wardrop will note that this is also the source of his misinformation about the amount of human-caused CO2 in the atmosphere, about which I have already corrected him.
Carter did provide a reference to his quote. Here it is: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,123013,00.html.
So, there you have it.
The source of this misinformation that is still regularly repeated by climate science deniers like Charles Wardrop, is a ‘story’ put out by the right wing Fox News some two decades ago. Carter, who died in 2016, was paid “$1,667 per month” as one of several “high-profile individuals who regularly and publicly counter the alarmist AGW message” by the Heartland Institute (in the USA), according to papers “obtained by DeSmogBlog”.
The Heartland Institute itself received funding from fossil fuel and tobacco industries.
Meanwhile, the truth about what climate scientists calculate as the relative contributions of various greenhouse gases is published in scientific journals and is freely available.
For example, https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2010/2010_Schmidt_sc05400j.pdf gives “Water vapour 50% Carbon Dioxide 19% Clouds 25% All Others 7%”.
Similarly, Clark Cross criticises the methodology of one paper (Cook et al, 2013) that found that 97% of scientists endorse Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) in papers from 1991 to 2011, and suggests the figure was only 32.6 per cent.
But Mr Cross ignores several other papers using different methodologies which found similar results to those given by Cook et al, including a paper, Lynas et al, 2021 that “update previous efforts to quantify the scientific consensus on climate change” by examining a random selection of 3,000 out of 88125 papers published since 2012, in which they found only four sceptical papers.
Their study was thus entitled, “Greater than 99% consensus on human caused climate change in the peer-reviewed scientific literature”.
Messrs Wardrop and Cross and others who continue to make false claims about climate science would do well to keep the following aphorism from Mark Twain in mind:
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble.
It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Roy Turnbull
Nethy Bridge.
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What has to be done to be a great nation?
I rather despair of our present national economic outlook and of the honesty and patriotic reliability of many of the politicians in the UK.
Although a patriotic Scotsman, having been born, educated and worked here, I fear for our present and future prosperity and confident wellbeing.
Mr Grant Frazer’s belief (Letters, 25 January) is that any political and economic benefits of Union are greatly outweighed by Scotland’s present political status in the UK.
Historically, although we Scots have been a financially poor nation, we have enjoyed the huge advantages of the high priorities accorded to education and to the exploitation of the wonderful natural resources of our land and seas.
Would Mr Frazer please spell out his ideas as to how to ‘Make Scotland Great Again’, as Donald Trump claims he could do for the US?
In my view, the abilities of any present political party or system to achieve that are not convincing.
However, the potential must surely exist for the enhancement of our prosperity and optimism.
What advice would Strathy readers offer to those in charge?
Charles Wardrop
Perth.
