Letter: Stormont's Net Zero target is impossible to meet

Your Morning View headline ‘​Stormont cannot just ignore the cost of its over ambitious Net Zero target,’ February 17, is a viewpoint which is largely erroneous.

Net Zero is an impossible target to meet, as when we had the Covid lockdown, CO2 still increased, with minimal global industry This CO2 v Temperature debate stems from an article by the climatologist Michael Mann et al 1998 (he of the Hockey Stick graph) that increasing Temperature in the 20th century, might be caused by CO2. The idea was taken up by Al Gore who wrote an ‘Inconvenient Truth’ which had a lot of inconsistencies and spiralled him to a Nobel Prize.

Unfortunately, the media seem to get their information from climate modellers whose temperature results don’t bear any relation to actual data. John Christy, who put up the satellite to measure temperature in 1979, testified before the US Senate in 2015 that of the then 102 climate models, not one was close to actual data.

This idea of CO2 causing an increase in temperature, is somewhat bogus. William Happer, from the Advanced Institute at Princeton, has shown if you double CO2 from 400ppm to 800ppm, there is a 0.71 degree Celsius increase. That is cold, hard physics. Hardly catastrophic.

We are technically in an Ice Age and the only thing that’s stopping it is CO2 which acts like a hot water bottle, but doesn’t drive the climate. Guys at Stormont, don’t spend unnecessary billions for nothing.

Peter Cooke, Belfast BT8