Sir - Your newspaper this week makes great play about the need for us to respect the 'sacrifices' made by soldiers in both world wars whose actions are commemorated on Remembrance Sunday and then publishes a letter from Michael Tyce complaining about the green vision requiring us to 'make sacrifices that would leave us worse off as individuals and hamstring our economy'.

Our present way of living has a range of ill-effects from increased asthma amongst urban dwellers, especially children, as a result of traffic-related pollution to increased obesity, degradation of natural environments and wasteful use of resources. I suspect the 'sacrifices' he resents giving up include the right to drive and fly wherever we want, whenever we want and the right to care little for how we use resources, produce our food or abuse those living in Third World countries by inequitable and unfair economic practices around buying produce and disposing of our waste. Perhaps if we used words such as altruism, mutual respect, consideration or community spirit instead of 'sacrifice', we could feel less hard done by and changing our behaviour would feel less of an affront.

And incidentally, the green vision does not include returning us to a 'pre-modern' world, but instead, ironically, is producing a fast rate of technological change enabling more economic, more efficient and less-polluting forms of energy. And as for 'untruths, the IPCC predict at best 'probable temperature rise by the end of the century of between 1.8C and 4C (3.2-7.2F)' not .02 degrees as Michael Tyce insists and that will bring many climatic changes in its wake which, if we don't act to try to mitigate will leave us as Nero 'fiddling while Rome burns'.

Ann Furtado, Oxford