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15 January 2000
From Terry Jackson
Your correspondent Frances MacGuire of Friends of the Earth is clearly confused in criticising the British government for blocking moves to exclude nuclear power from the Clean Development Mechanism at the Climate Change Summit (4 December, p 52) . The Kyoto targets cannot be met by renewable energy alone. Only with a vigorous nuclear power …
15 January 2000
From Janet Godfrey
Your article on the external costs of farming perpetuates the myth, invented in the 1960s, that agriculture is damaging the environment (18 December, p 10) . Not one of these "costs" holds water. First, 80 per cent of pesticides cleaned up by water companies are non-agricultural. The major culprits are local authorities and railways. Secondly, …
15 January 2000
From Andrew Mosi
The idea proposed in your editorial (18 December, p 3) about placing the label "good for the planet—all externalities included" on foods that have been priced to reflect their true cost should be extended to all products, particularly petrol (gasoline) and products derived largely from fossil fuels. If the price of all consumer goods reflected …
15 January 2000
From Roger Hull
Your report on genetically modified potatoes that can resist potato blight and other fungal diseases includes the predictable knee-jerk response from the anti-GM lobby (11 December, p 8) . Despite the effect that this breakthrough would have had on a major historical disaster, the Irish potato famine, I can imagine that if there had been …
15 January 2000
From Joe Hartney
Your report states that the new GM crop would have prevented the Irish potato famine. This sort of statement is a fairly typical "spin" being used by those wishing to justify the continued development of GM foods, such as that these foods will help end world hunger. In fact, although the potato blight devastated the …
15 January 2000
From Rudi Van Nieuwenhove
In the article on "dark energy", George Kraniotis says: "Oddly enough, nobody considered whether might have an effect on the scale of individual galaxies" (18 December, p 15) . However, this was exactly the point in the paper "Is the missing mass really missing?", which I published in 1998 in Astronomical and Astrophysical Transactions (vol …
15 January 2000
From Rob Spence
What an enlightening piece by Peter Ayton (11 December, p 47) . Many thousands of men have either been traumatised by having their genitals mutilated by circumcision without their consent, or feel that they have been significantly harmed by the procedure, or at the very least regret that their penises have been permanently altered. Yet …
15 January 2000
From Name and address supplied
One aspect of circumcision has been totally ignored by Peter Ayton, who has obviously not spoken to any women on the subject. I have had many lovers during my life. All the British men among them (all born in the 1940s) had been circumcised. None of them knew why and none of them felt traumatised. …
15 January 2000
From Arthur C. Clarke
Good for Peter Ayton. I made the same point in 3001—The Final Odyssey. Future generations will find it inconceivable that millions of Americans mutilated their babies owing to the influence of a man who, as your quotation shows, was obviously a sadistic lunatic. This gives me an excuse for a joke I heard recently which …
15 January 2000
From K. H. von Kaufmann
If Joel Berger and Carol Cunningham's moose impersonation is good enough to allow them to study the animals close up (25 December 1999/1 January 2000, p 62) , I wonder whether they have taken into account that they may end up doing some unique but inadvertent research into predation of moose, from a first-person perspective?
Issue no. 2221 published 15 January 2000
