IT IS depressing how a discussion that ought to be about climate change and the disaster that we are imposing on the world descends into complaints about untidy posters (Letters, March 6), writes a reader.

When will people get real about this?

Last week, for the first time in two years, there was a parliamentary debate on climate change.

A widely published photo of the House in session showed nine MPs on the Government benches and about twenty on the opposition side.

This means that about 620 MPs did not think the debate interesting enough to attend.

Is it any wonder that young people are frustrated by this?

They have a right to be angry.

Sir David Attenborough recently warned that the present crisis could mean the end of civilization: it is already resulting in rising sea levels and an extinction rate a thousand or more times higher than the background rate.

Shouldn't we be talking about that, rather than whether a few posters make the town look untidy?

Chris Fletcher makes a good point about population.

Recent studies have shown that the greenest thing anyone can do is to have fewer children than they might otherwise have had.

Population is growing at about 81 million a year, a billion every twelve years: there is absolutely no way that can be sustainable.

As for Brian Cooke's letter, UKIP appears to have no understanding of this crisis whatsoever.

A quick search 'UKIP climate policy' finds among other things an article on a report by UKIP MEP Stuart Agnew that denies the human role in climate change, attributing it to sunspots and cosmic rays: this has drawn the rebuke from Dave Reay, professor of carbon management at Edinburgh University that: "It is fitting that this laughable document misuses palaeoclimate information in its case against human induced climate change - the hackneyed, pseudo-scientific arguments here would make a dinosaur blush."

Roger Plenty

Stroud