Surely if the writer does not wish to be accused of hypocrisy he should leave the USA with its rapacious banks, industrial military complex and universities filled with departments of death, and go and live in Greece. Given the state of Greek economy and the likelihood that it will be forced to leave the EEC, Greece will no doubt have to undergo a massive devaluation and will only be able to afford a much smaller percentage of the coal, gas and oil it currently imports. The writer given his education and beliefs would then be an excellent leader to help the Greeks transform themselves into the low carbon economy he is seeking.

Only someone with the rosiest possible glasses stuck firmly in front of their eyes could produce a sentence like this one:

>>However, the thoughtless and ungrateful bankers and corporate managers demanding all their money back from Greece forget that without Greece they would still be living in caves.<<

The bankers' "thoughtlessness", Mr Vallianatos, was in the lending.

They totally ignored the fact that they were loaning other people's money to a country so infected with sloth, so indolent, yet at the same time utterly profligate. They epitomised the observation made years ago by Euromoney's Christopher Fildes about the banks themselves, but which applies equally to governments to which those banks lend:

"Giving capital to a bank is like giving a gallon of beer to a drunk: you know what will come of it, but you can't know which wall he will choose"

No mention either, by Mr Vallianatos, on the venality of the government that authorized such borrowing in the first place. What we do get is a massive dose of self-pity for the demise of a great civilization, consumed by greed and sloth.

Not to mention that he gets carried away with his own rhetoric, into the realms of fantasy:

"Like Dark-Age barons, international bankers and members of the industrial-military-academic complex have embraced death in nuclear bombs, genetic engineering, nuclear power plants, industrialized agriculture, perpetual war, and fuelling higher temperature for the planet."

This "parallel" is beyond parody. Name one "Dark-Age baron" that was in a position to bring any of the above to bear, even metaphorically. There was no equivalent to international banking, let alone genetic engineering or nuclear power plants.

Overblown, to the extent that any relationship with the real Dark Ages disappears completely, at which point the entire article becomes meaningless.

Please, encourage all your like-minded colleagues to drink hemlock. And set a good example yourself.

The emergence of a new political party in, of all places, California. The Useful Idiots for Obama

The author makes repeated references to the Dark Ages. In the Dark Ages the climate is known to have been colder than now. It was certainly not the reason for the problems of those times, but the colder climate didn't help. Medieval times were climatically warmer and Europe, in particular, thrived. Life was still brutish and short but the great cathedrals were built.

Climatic conditions are warm again, with many scientists attributing some of the extra warmth to industrial activity, but why should additional warmth on top of what we are experiencing now bring on a new dark age? The writer has left out a couple of steps in his reasoning. The bit about how the world really owes the Greeks a living can be ignored..

In the seventies, in my undergraduate geography class, we learnt that Bangladesh sits on a tectonic plate which is, very slowly, tilting down to the east, so that the Bangladeshi coastline is always sinking, while the Bengali coastline to the west is slowly rising.

Ever since then, I've assumed that anybody who talks about rising sea-levels along the coast of Bangladesh being due to global warming is a charlatan.

Or rising sea-levels in the Nile Delta, now that the Aswan Dam is in place, trapping sediment which would have gone to maintain the Alexandrian lowlands.

Measuring sea-levels by their effects on coast-lines must be a very difficult business, what with some coasts rising with adjustments to the weight of the glacial ice-sheet from the last Ice Age, other coast-lines rising or falling with tectonic movement like Australia's east coast.

To get back to Greece: I wonder how many governments play this Ponzi Scheme: borrow huge amounts to curry favour with the electorate, wink at tax evasion, leave the debt to the next government and then whinge about greedy foreign banks when they want 'their' (i.e. our) money back.

There is an easy solution to Greece's woes: all those who think that lending to Greece without much prospect of getting their money back is some sort of progressive politics, please do so, urgently and enthusiastically.

Joe