Sir - Michael Tyce condemns Climate X Change's graphic illustration, of Victorian bloomers sharing a washing line with thongs (Letters, November 2), because he thinks it fails to take account of the fact that bloomers existed for reasons of modesty rather than warmth.

This is not the paradoxical red herring it at first appears because the 'modesty', which Michael Tyce avows, was very important to the preservation of taboo; the Victorians were covering up their anxieties about sex, while today it is the implications of climate change that we must avoid mentioning.

Taboo is about not questioning the way power works and it has shrouded the public dissemination of information and the possibility of public debate for three decades. The BBC, which is paid for directly by viewers, recently fought shy of showing a day of programmes about climate change. I presume they were reluctant to offend those who, like Michael Tyce, wish to deny the international scientific consensus about the part human fossil fuel consumption has played in speeding it up.

Taboo also operates as a social control, in the tool-kit of dysfunctional ideology, to prioritise abstracts - such as the imperative of economic growth over the physical realities of the natural world.

Wars 'against terror', reds under beds and outrage in defence of 'modest' political underpinnings can't disguise the fact that we're fossil fuel junkies, out of time and need to change our way of life - and fast.

Susan Heeks, Oxford