With church numbers drastically falling, religious apathy rising and Christmas approaching, perhaps the Bishop of Blackburn would make better use of his time by sticking to his brief, rather than preach the propaganda of “climate change” through the Letters page of the Lancashire Telegraph.

Following the disclosure that scientists at the University of East Anglia have been covering up facts which go some way to disprove the myth of man-made global warming, and the recent publication of Christopher Booker’s magnificent and logical rebuttal to the nonsense perpetuated by the Bishop and his ilk, now is, it seems to me, a rather odd time for public figures to continue to preach the frankly dubious theory that global warming is being caused by the actions of mankind.

Whether or not the earth is warming up or cooling down (an issue far from being conclusively decided), the proposition that the actions of man are causing any global warming that may or may not exist is preposterous.

And I find it laughable that the Bishop thinks that natural disasters such as the terrible floods of the last few weeks in Cumbria were down to man’s “carbon footprints”.

Bishops should not be figures of fun. The earth has gone through many cyclical climate changes, both heating and cooling, and it is quite probable that this is the case now.

The last great ice age – the Pleistocene epoch – came and went without being caused by the CO2 emissions of cave lions, or the frequent flying of woolly mammoths in their aeroplanes. It was a natural, geo-physical phenomenon – nothing more.

The great global warming con being fuelled by people such as the Bishop of Blackburn and Al Gore is merely a way of the great liberal literatti finding new avenues by which to stop us enjoing ourselves, based upon dubious and inconclusive scientific research.

If the people who preached such scare-stories truly believed what they were saying, why don’t they stop flying in planes themselves? Why don’t they give up their cars? Why don’t they lead by example?

The Copenhagen summit will do nothing more than create hot air, as politicians attempt to solve a problem that doesn’t exist and is out of their hands regardless.

Thank God that the hot air will have no effect on the climate!

Simon Wilkinson, Heaning Avenue, Blackburn.