• RECENT articles and letters (for example, from Lorna Jane Russell, January 12), as well as administrative actions by Camden Council within the mission of Cllr Adam Harrison, reflect on the borough committing to become “carbon-neutral” by 2030.

We read demonisation of the council’s plans to refit gas boilers in properties such as the Alexandra & Ainsworth estate, but see nearby pavement “eateries” which reduce parking but will warm up their outdoor diners in winter with powerful gas heaters.

Elsewhere there are small sections of roads blocked off to traffic with the assumption that carbon-burning vehicles being absent from there (but neglecting the fuming traffic jams) will helpfully reduce the overall “footprint” of the borough’s carbon emissions.

Is this obsession with supposing that one has prevented the last atom of carbon from entering the atmosphere over Camden, justified, indeed healthy?

The major university, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2011 website), reported that “water vapor is the major player in the greenhouse effect and is often omitted from reports and reporting about global warming”.

It leads to a discussion (as took place in a website from NASA’s Earth Observatory in 2002) of how carbon dioxide and water vapour can combine to produce hydrocarbonic acid, which falls to Earth as weakly acid rain.

As the NASA weather scientists pointed out, the “washing out” of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is extremely uneven across the globe and “some places will receive more rainfall and other places will receive less, as is the case with current droughts in the Pacific Northwest and in much of Africa. ‘There will be winners and there will be losers’”.

These complications do not fully dismiss the case for “carbon prudence” but the findings and discussions from these major authorities remind us that a certain amount of “global warming” is welcome and has been developing for centuries since the most recent “little ice age”.

At a more personal level, stoking up higher levels of despondency and fear may well be more psychologically damaging than is socially suffered by releasing modest amounts of carbon dioxide into the air.

MALLORY WOBER, NW3