SHOULD Linda Lever have read my letter in the Courier on May 1, she would not have needed to query the source of my information. In none of my letters did I refer to The Heartland Institute and The International Conference on Climate Change which, I agree, are funded by the energy industry. However, The Global Warming Policy Foundation, which I did quote, declares that it "is funded entirely by voluntary donations from a number of private individuals and charitable trusts. In order to make clear its complete independence, it does not accept gifts from either energy companies or anyone with a significant interest in an energy company." The scientists involved in the inquiry into the manipulation of climate data are hardly "dodgy", being experts in physics, climatology and statistics and chaired by Professor Terence Kealey, the former vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham (see http://www.tempdatareview.org/people">http://www.tempdatareview.org/people ). Turning to the claim that 97 per cent of climate scientists agree with a recent AAAS statement, this statistic dates from 2004, 10 years before the quoted document. In Science and Education in August 2013, David R Legates (a professor of geography at the University of Delaware and former director of its Centre for Climatic Research) and three co-authors reviewed peer-reviewed papers published from 1991 to 2011 "only 41 papers—0.3 per cent of all 11,944 abstracts or 1.0 per cent of the 4,014 expressing an opinion, and not 97.1 per cent—had been found to endorse" the claim that human activity is causing most of the current warming (source: The Myth of the Climate Change '97 per cent' Wall Street Journal: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303480304579578462813553136">http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303480304579578462813553136 ). As I stated in my letter published on May 1, more than 1,000 scientists have challenged man-made global warming claims, a far more significant number than 41. The matters of unconventional oil and gas extraction are not relevant to my letter and, I presume, have been included to add to Ms Lever's and the other correspondents' green propaganda. I shall leave these matters for another time. Roland Smith Pitt Court Nymet Rowland