YET again Clark Cross (Letter, October 11) and Geoff Moore (Letters, October 9) rush to contradict the latest dire warning from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). However I suggest that they, and the rest of the tiny minority of climate change deniers in Scotland, have met their match from a most interesting source.

At a recent meeting in London Ben van Beurden, the CEO of Royal Dutch Shell, told an oil and gas industry audience that “it would be a major challenge to limit temperature rises to 1.5°C if a dangerous warming is to be avoided”.

However even more interesting is his opinion that we need to do so much more than “a little bit more solar, a bit more wind. What is needed is massive reforestation. Think of another Brazil in terms of rainforest: you can get to 1.5°C”.

I have no doubt that some of your readers will be somewhat cynical about the opinion of one of the major figures in the oil and gas industry.

However I believe that he and the IPCC who also promote such a scale of reforestation ought to be listened to by our governments, even ours which is so needlessly paralysed by a fruitless search for answers to the self-imposed Brexit disaster. I also hope that the Scottish Government, for all its fine words on climate change is not too taken up by a second independence referendum.

There surely can be little doubt that such a global project, even if probably far short of the whole answer, is a realistic contribution to meeting the challenge of anthropogenic global warming.

John Milne,

9 Ardgowan Drive, Uddingston.