Why he was asked to comment on a subject on which he has no expertise is unclear, but in these strange times it seems common for the opinions of cele… - Dave Goulson

Some previous deliberate introductions of non-native species to Australia had gone horribly wrong: for example, cane toads from South America, introduced to help control sugar cane pests, have themselves become a plague, proliferating to the point where there are now estimated to be about 200 million of them, eating everything except the pests they were intended to control.

Supporters of the chemtrail theory are generally dismissed as crackpots, and rightly so, because it is absurd to believe that a conspiracy on the scale they describe could possibly be kept quiet. It is not much more plausible than suggesting that the Earth is flat.

I am not suggesting that petitions are a waste of time – they actually take up very little time – but don’t expect them to achieve much. There is a danger that people feel that the job is done, just because their favoured petition has reached a certain number of signatures. We will not save the planet simply by signing petitions, no matter how many we sign; they are a little more than a displacement activity.