I write in response to Mr Phelps's letter in the Review, June 5.

While I wholeheartedly support the principles of "living lightly on the earth" it seems Mr Phelps has fallen victim to the environment lobby.

Like other political lobby groups, the environment lobby has no hesitation in fabricating evidence to support its bid for power and influence.

While there is a consensus among responsible environment scientists that human activity has significantly modified the course of climate change over the last 7,000 years (there is nothing new in climate change), most responsible environmental scientists stop short of concluding that we can predict the course of climate change with any certainty. Nor can we reasonably forecast the outcome of any specific climate change policy.

As science has discovered, the planet is a complex, chaotic system in constant flux.  Like the stock market, the economy or the weather in a month's time, it is essentially impossible to build a model that we can trust to predict the future. At various times in the past, CO2 levels have been very much lower and very much higher than today, without the runaway disaster scenarios beloved of environmental alarmists.

Mr Phelps asserts that more than a million have died from the Chernobyl accident. This is a topic that the United Nations has studied very carefully with  help from the army of scientists and engineers deployed on the ground to help in Ukraine.

As of 2008, the total confirmed deaths from radiation was set at 64. Another group of scientists, the Chernobyl Forum, predicts the eventual death toll from all causes related to the Chernobyl accident could rise to 4,000 after cancer survival rates are factored in over the lifetimes of the rest of us on the planet.

This represents about 0.01 per cent of all cancers since the accident.

While Chernobyl was an unfortunate and unnecessary tragedy, this is hardly the global disaster of 30,000 to 60,000 deaths estimated by the European Greens party and the million deaths claim which originates with the Russian chapter of Greenpeace.

The New York Academy of Sciences has characterised the million deaths claim as more science fiction than science fact. These claims should be taken with a large pinch of salt.

Make no mistake, many of the policies advocated by the lobby (for example solar power subsidies in the UK) are at best misguided and at worst a destructive waste of the precious resources they claim to champion.

As the German Greens say of the British Greens, it is time they grew up to take a more responsible view of the real world.

– David Clarke, Tidenham.