HAVING read Don Graham's interesting letter 'A natural phenomenon" (Letters, June 13), I wonder to what extent those schoolchildren who have recently been demonstrating about climate matters receive a balanced view on this issue from schools.

Is it the case that most teachers who address climate change in their classrooms treat the science as 'settled' and merely focus on ways to reduce human emissions of greenhouse gases?

If this is so, perhaps students could be better served by letting them know that a vibrant debate is taking place among scientists on how big the human impact on climate is, and whether or not we should be worried about it.

The most important fact about climate science, often overlooked, is that scientists disagree about environmental impacts of the combustion of fossil fuels on the global climate. There is no survey or study showing "consensus" and that "scientists agree". To say there is, is deliberately misleading.

The oft-made claim that "97 per cent of scientists agree" that climate change is man-made and dangerous is not only false, but its presence in the debate is an insult to science, and clouds the current debate on climate change.

Over climatic time scales of many thousands of years, temperature is cooling; over the meteorological time scale of the past 18 years there has been no net warming despite an increase of CO2 of eight per cent, which represents 34 per cent of all human-related CO2 emissions released to the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.

There is no empirical evidence to support the assertion that a planetary warming of 2 C degrees would be a threat ecologically or economically damaging.

Evidence is accruing that changes in Earth's surface temperatures are largely driven by variations in solar activity, for example -The Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age, and early 20th Century (1910 -1940) Warm Period.

Such examples merely scratch the surface, but our young deserve better than the anecdotal, alarmist and often sensationalised position sometimes fed to them.

Balance in all things. Demonstrate by all means but base your views on a balanced understanding. As a nation we seem increasingly unable to cope with examining a balanced view of so many issues.

Clive Carroll

Kendal