Madam, - Tony Allwright (November 8th) writes: "There are many of us who are convinced that Islamic terrorism is the single gravest threat facing mankind today". This is arrant nonsense. One hundred times a greater threat is global warming. Tuesday's edition carried a report headed, "Accelerated Arctic thaw threatens livelihood of millions". Already even America is feeling the effects of global warming in the increased ferocity of the cycle of tornadoes attacking her shores.
And on this score President Bush - and indeed all his immediate predecessors in office - has been criminally negligent, refusing to sign the Kyoto Conventions, and refusing to do anything effective against greenhouse gas emissions that might hurt his big-business supporters in their pockets.
The US is by far the greatest polluter. In a few years the effects of this negligence will be felt in America, but always the greatest sufferers will be the desperately poor people of the world who live in their millions in the alluvial lowlands of Asia.
Compared with this imminent threat, Islamic fundamentalist terrorism is small beer. - Yours, etc.,
DAVID ROWE, Woodside Road, Dublin 18