YOUR VIEWS: Poor turnout sends wrong message to HIE on Cairngorm Mountain
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Last Wednesday at 6.30pm in the Coire Cas car park a protest, organised by ski school worker Mike Marcus, was held to highlight the problems with the business Cairngorm Mountain (Scotland) Ltd and to show Highlands and Islands Enterprise and CM(S)L the strength of feeling about the way the business is being ‘managed’.
Unfortunately, as Mr Marcus said in the Strathy last week, “no one was doing anything about things despite….the deep local concern”, and that local attitude continues.
Outside the area there is a lot of work being done by myself and others to try and make the business successful again.
A meeting with the cabinet secretary and her supporting minister has been requested to progress a plan for sustainability.
The total turnout to support Mr Marcus? Some 14 concerned locals including a 93-year-old lady and her seriously ill daughter - my mother and sister! Where were the members of the Cairngorm Action Croup, Aviemore and Glenmore Community Trust, Aviemore Business Association, Cairngorms Business Partnership, Cairngorms National Park Authority board, Snowsports Scotland and others?
Where were the local skiers, snowboarders and ski schools? Where were the local Highland councillors?
All of them nowhere to be seen, leaving it to a few who stood up to be counted.
But there could be a real negative result.
HIE and CM(S)L have effectively been told that the local area is not interested in what is going on at Cairn Gorm despite the millions of pounds been spent to keep the business open.
It gives HIE the opportunity to close the business permanently as economically unsustainable fairly confident that there will be very little local resistance.
Is that when people will actually get up and do something? Please don’t leave it that late.
Graham Garfoot
Jarrow.
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Building on success
The recent announcement about the Grantown medical centre upgrade turn-around was good news. Well done to all involved, a sensible decision indeed.
The Scottish ruling folk were convinced to listen to advice based on logic and old fashioned common sense based on the numbers and the facts.
Now we need to analyse and seek answers to the problems that confront us, and turn our backs on the debacles of our failed A9 dualling and ferry approaches.
I believe we can make headway if we stop green dreaming and make decisions we can possibly all be equally unhappy with, while making headway on real issues and timeframes that are attainable.
We also need to adapt the way we deal with the issues at hand; the present vested interest based system needs an overhaul too.
Think of the goods and services arriving in our neck of the woods. The transport network is wholly diesel or petrol fuelled with no real Plan B or electrical rail solution in sight.
If we want the Highlands to continue to thrive we certainly will need tourism and a functioning economy so it’s time to seriously start seeking solutions, and not opt for the banking or tourism industry’s flight and dump those they should be supporting; a simply ghastly way to foster community spirit. I hope this heralds the start of co-operation and attaining common goals which our kids and grandkids can look on with pride in their hearts.
Paul Aarden
Aviemore.
* * *
An end is in sight
I am delighted to see that you are to begin to use your editorial prerogative to decide which of the letters you have received to print.
When letters on one topic continually take up 60 per cent of the available column cms of the letter’s pages, and those letters are from fewer than five correspondents - which has been the pattern over recent months - it is welcome news.
Whilst climate change is a crucially important issue other matters are also important to your readers.
What about the state of Scottish health and education services?
The end of the Bute House agreement? The demographics of our communities? The chronic lack of housing for local people and workers required in the strath?
The cost of living, including the price of food and, yes, fish?
All this is, I know, dependent on your readers contributing but perhaps you could limit the space given to the old ‘green ink’ warhorses and let’s have multiple conversations about varieties of topics of concern to us all.
David Goodall
Boat of Garten.
* * *
Repeating falsehoods on climate emergency but still great untruths
Charles Wardrop again repeats misinformation (Strathspey & Badenoch Herald, April 25).
Contrary to his claim, there is little doubt within respected climate science that greenhouse gases emissions are a major influence on recent climate change (IPCC ‘6 th Assessment Report’).
The sun is not the main controller of climate change now (NASA ‘Is the sun causing global warming?).
While more CO2 in the atmosphere may in some circumstances help increase photosynthesis, heat and drought desiccate plants.
That is to say nothing of storms, floods and wildfires that kill plants.
Climate change far outweighs benefits of more CO2 (Scientific American ‘Climate Skeptics Want More C02’).
UK costs of £3 trillion or more to reach net zero by 2050 are meaningless, because they ignore benefits of this investment and the cost of not tackling global warming (HM Treasury Net Zero Reviews 2020 and 2021).
Wardrop’s repeated claims should fool no one until he shows how they stand up to contrary evidence.
However, this time he offers in support ‘Climate – the Movie: The Cold Truth’.
This populous video spouts untruths, such as “there is no such thing as a climate emergency” despite floods, fires, storms and 33 million children in Bangladesh off-school because of heatwave (The Guardian, April 26 ‘Wave of exceptionally hot weather scorches south and south-east Asia’).
It misleads with claims such as that today is “maybe not quite the coldest it has been in the 500 million years, but remarkably close to it”; whereas present warming threatens agriculture and cities that have developed over the time blip of the past 11,000 years.
Lynas et al (Environmental Research Letters, 16, 114005) show that, while over 99 per cent of refereed journals support the conclusion that climate change is man-made, 27 per cent of adults in the United States doubted this.
So how can this be?
How do each of us know what we know?
There are several ways, besides fact-based science.
One is what people around us say.
Most of us follow the weight of opinion.
Thus, the danger of repeated misinformation is that many believe it.
Another basis is self-interest: it is human nature to believe that we each deserve good fortune.
Michael Baird (Strathy, April 25) accuses me and Kay Caldwell of falling for deliberate scaremongering by the ‘lucrative climate industry’.
I hope he does not insinuate that I try to mislead others so as to protect my interest: I have no financial interest in what I write here.
However, his accusation reminds one of obfuscation by the fossil fuel industry, an industrial complex of far greater financial power (Guardian, April 14 ‘How to spot five of the fossil fuel industry’s biggest disinformation tactics’).
Dermot Williamson
The Brae.
Kincraig.
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Getting on-board the pro-green gravy train
After reading the pro-green letters from Dermot Williamson and Kay Caldwell it was a joy to read the sensible letter from Paul Aarden (Strathy letters, April 18).
No doubt Williamson and Caldwell will be sharpening their quills.
Dermot Williamson spouts the usual green mantra that over 99 per cent of peer reviewed literature supports the theory of man-made global warming. Rubbish.
Those on the Climate Gravy Train repeat parrot wise that ‘97 per cent of scientists endorse the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory’ and that the science is settled.
But how was this 97 per cent calculated?
John Cook, an Australian web programmer and blogger, with a PhD in philosophy assembled a group of volunteers and tasked them with examining the summaries of 11,944 climate papers from 1991-2011 with the topics ‘global climate change’ or ‘global warming’.
The volunteers said 3,896 endorsed AGW, 7,930 had no AGW position, 78 rejected AGW and 40 were uncertain.
Instead of admitting that just 3,896, 32.6 per cent of the climate papers endorsed AGW they removed the 7,930 which did not take a position on AGW leaving just 4,014 abstracts of which 3,896 (97 per cent) supposedly endorsed AGW.
There are lies, damned lies and climate percentages lies.
Clark Cross
Linlithgow.
