SIR — Anyone who has chaired a meeting will know that the ideal size for a committee to achieve anything is about 12, with the slight chance of making sporadic progress with no more than double that figure.

The idea that anything helpful could be agreed in Denmark by 17,000 delegates from nearly 200 countries, some of whom did not believe in the new religion of man-made global warming anyway, was so ludicrous that one wonders how it ever came to pass.

How appropriate then that Mother Nature conjured up a freezing blizzard as a grand finale, though even this failed to conceal the largest carbon footprint ever seen since the expression was invented, as a tribute to mass hypocrisy.

Most of the developed countries were seeking to limit the damage to their economies that would be caused by the adoption of too much 'greenery', whilst the emerging countries were trying to work out how much money they could screw out of the larger countries in return for prostrating themselves at the altar of the man-made warming orthodoxy.

An early start to the pantomime season in fact.

Meanwhile, some smart international entrepreneurs are making a fortune out of trading carbon credits, whereby polluting companies can get huge rebates by shutting down smelters in one country and thus funding the building of new ones somewhere else where there is cheaper labour (eg the Corus plant at Redcar).

It is ironic that many delegates were pointing the finger at China as being the world's main polluter, yet it is only China that has faced up to the real problem, which is the population explosion.

Whilst it is possible to argue that climate change in either direction is cyclical and due to solar variations, sensible sceptics should admit that there is a man-made problem, which is our capacity to multiply far too quickly for the planet to continue to sustain us in harmony with the myriad other species which we aspire to protect and co-exist with.

We should urgently re-think our welfare culture, whereby those who contribute nothing to the country are paid large sums to produce lots of children, who in turn are likely to become feckless procreators themselves.

Less than a century ago, people had children only when they could afford to bring them up without state handouts.

Logic would suggest that there should be a tax liable to be paid by any couple having, say, more than two children.

Whilst we are thinking the unthinkable, is it not time that pressure was brought to bear on Rome to relax its hostility to contraception?

There now, that should be enough controversy to carry us cheerfully into the new year! Please discuss . . Stephen Dear,

Northfield Road,

Minehead.