In the last seven days, 18,000 Americans died from COVID-19 and the President's response has been to bitch at the media, tell bald-faced lies, incite riots and civil disobedience, remove funding from the international body co-ordinating the health response to the pandemic and put great stain on a tenuous international relationship that America needs, in no small part, to contain North Korea.

That's seven WTC death tolls in seven days and the best the leader of the free world can do is pout and posture and demand business as usual?

Who would have Dubya would have looked a better alternative?

Peter Langston, Tamworth

The government wants us to give our information freely by using the COVID-19 app. The payoff should be that there are to be no refusals of information or redaction under any freedom of information request.

It has to be a two-way street. They want to view our lives in great detail, it is only reasonable that the same applies to government.

Graeme Harris, Calala

I am puzzled by one of your regular correspondents. On the one hand he is impressed at how well Scott Morrison is doing in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic because he is listening to the experts and taking their advice. On the other hand he seems to be impressed that Scott Morrison is largely ignoring expert advice on climate change.

Overall, Morrison has done well with management of the pandemic so far. It is an immediate problem requiring full attention from the government. However climate change has not gone away. It has justifiably, but hopefully only temporarily, been usurped by COVID-19.

You don't need to be Einstein to know that climate change will have major ramifications in the medium to long term, but it would certainly be useful to have him around in this climate to counter global warming sceptics in the federal government.

I am also puzzled as to why the Leader is publishing letters which deny the existence of human induced global warming. There is no doubt that global temperatures are increasing - just look at global temperature records since the 19th century. There is no doubt that CO2 is a major greenhouse gas - the increased warming of air which contains higher CO2 concentrations was noted by Eunice Foote and John Tyndall in the 1850s. Human induced warming of the planet by our CO2 emissions was predicted by scientists in the 1890s. Virtually all climate experts are in agreement that emissions need to reduce to net zero by about 2050. The IPCC says that a 7.6 degree reduction year on year is needed to meet the Paris target. We can't and wouldn't want to rely on COVID-19 to do it for us.

The pandemic has shown us that we can work together in order to make a major dent in the transmission of coronavirus. We should be able to do the same with reducing greenhouse gas emissions once the pandemic is brought under control. We all need to make some changes.

Tim Robilliard, Tamworth

I promised myself I wouldn't join the idiocy again. But after his consecutive letters, I find I cannot allow Mr Peckham's latest attempt at ideological propaganda to go through to the keeper ("Climate Emergency", NDL, April 16). There is a current political fetish for repeating a lie often enough to turn it into a fact. That tactic was first promoted by a gentleman in the early 1940s. Mr Peckham's continual suggestion that climate change is a fallacy follows that pattern and is vexatious. However, his claim that he predicted the demise of climate change simply because it has fallen off the news cycle is pompously ludicrous. Of course the deadly COVID-19 pandemic has necessarily captured the world's attention. But, just as the climate debate has deferred to a more immediate calamity, the victims of the devastating drought and bushfires have also been neglected by news outlets recently. Would Mr Peckham tell them that their disasters too were only a passing inconvenience, not a "real problem" like the virus? As well he might choose to investigate how the promised subsidies to those same drought and fire victims are going, as this Morrison government seems to have trouble walking and chewing gum at the same time.

As for my previous analogy on tilting at windmills, Mr Peckham obviously has little knowledge of the classic Spanish "La Mancha" novel. To explain my comparison, Don Qixote on his horse, doing the manic tilting, was in fact referring to his friend Mr Joyce; Mr Peckham was not compared to Quixote, but to his loyal servant, Sancho Panza, riding beside him on a donkey. Now there I go too, being pompously ludicrous. Enough.

Bert Candy, Glenvale