Letters archive

You observe in a Leader article on the scientific illiteracy of politicians that "It is a pity those making the laws don't... try thinking before they act" ( 7 November, p 5 ). A pity? I commend your restraint. I also condemn it. Many years ago I was lobbying on a particular topic. It became …

Most registered psychotherapists would probably agree that it is regrettable that mandatory government regulation for practitioners was not enforced in 2012 ( 10 October, p 3 ). This failure left the profession loosely regulated, as you state, leaving unregistered practitioners free to choose to call themselves counsellors or psychotherapists. But to equate this with people …

We're right behind you, mate. Well, actually, we're safely back on board Jacqui Chaplin appreciates David Jacoby's free-diving mission to tag hammerhead sharks ( 14 November, p 12 )

Fred Pearce questioned the way it became generally accepted that invasive species are a significant threat for biodiversity ( 5 September, p 26 ). He identified our letter in Trends in Ecology and Evolution ( TREE ) in 2005 as one of the main sources and wrote: "The authors told me they had not kept …

I am grateful to New Scientist for helping to make more widely known my observation that "branes", as defined by Gia Dvali, Gregory Gabadadze and Massimo Porrati (DGP), can leave traces in the spectra of quasars ( 24 October, p 30 ). The article is generally well researched, but I think it's worth emphasising that …

Dan Jones's article on morality was interesting, but would have been far more compelling if he had dealt with moral dilemmas that had no grey area, actual or perceived ( 26 September, p 36 ). For example, while most New Scientist readers (me included) accept that the best explanation of current climate data is that …

Psychologist Robert Gifford identifies 33 psychological barriers stopping us from tackling climate change ( 11 July, p 28 ). But what about nominative determinism? Maybe we haven't taken action on global warming because the word "warming" has positive connotations for the inhabitants of temperate regions, where the world's decision-makers tend to be. When global warming …

Michael Le Page simply asserts that it would be "politically unacceptable" to "curb the lifestyles of the jet-setting elite", without further justification ( 17 October, p 8 ). Unacceptable to whom? Certainly not to me. History offers many examples of direct community action to curb the antisocial activities of the few, when persuasion and pleas …

Your leader article on carbon pricing ( 17 October, p 5 ) sounds very much like a proposal by climate scientist James Hansen : see for example his description at bit.ly/TaxAndDividend . Beyond national pricing, he suggests taxing fossil fuel as it crosses borders, if the exporting country doesn't already tax it. No fossil-fuel-exporting country …

It is tragic that a number of people in California have been killed or rendered homeless by fires ( 26 September, p 6 ). But the loss of forest is, surely, also catastrophic. Has the moral compass hit a magnetic reversal? Australian media are also awful in this regard. "No property was lost," they say, …

• A letter about educational measurement was in fact written by Russell Waugh ( 31 October ).