No doubt Nelson, Bishop and Minchin will squeeze every bit of political capital they can get out of it all.

I will throw a couple of questions back to him. Has he read and understood Chapter 3 of Garnaut's draft report and reviewed it in the light of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports and the great swag of scientific literature, including much from CSIRO, on which that chapter is based? Would he be comfortable if given an examination on it?

What specific scientific evidence can he produce to rebut the proposition that there is a high probability that man-made activities are already causing a major climate change, with much worse to come unless remedial action is taken forthwith?

Jack Lonergan, Isaccs

When Jack Kershaw suggests (July 6) hooking up ''vast arrays of solar collectors'' to preheat the water in existing power stations his use of the word ''vast'' was right on the money.

For a 1000 megawatt power station the area of solar collectors required would be something like 1.52sqkm, and that would only work for about eight hours out of the 24 no storage being possible in this case.

The money might be better spent on reducing electricity consumption in the first place by providing distributed solar collectors on individual houses.

Here the solar energy collected is used 100 per cent and can be stored.

Far better than trying to feed it into a power-generating process which is intrinsically only about 40 per cent efficient anyway.

Roger Quarterman, Campbell

Useless artists

The general community has never been entirely convinced that artists are not a bunch of irrelevant, out-of-touch pseudo-intellectuals. Now Art Monthly Australia seems determined to convince us all of their uselessness.