Trees also prevent a safe line-of-sight at many street corners. We plant trees next to street gutters and under power lines, and plant them too close to footpaths so the roots lift the path and trips older citizens who break bones. Tree roots lift house foundations and front brick fences.

Council cannot expect cooperation from home owners to look after these trees if the council makes bad tree choices. Many will be pulled out and vandals will be blamed. The above does not say there are not suitable trees, and safe areas to plant them, but please use some intelligent thinking before you plant.

We do not want council-caused fatalities in our city.

Don Woodward, Brown Hill.

The City of Ballarat and the state government need to reconsider their attitudes towards public consultation. The state government's recent tokenistic consultation on the future of the Ballarat station site which consisted of a poorly-advertised public meeting at which bureaucrats told participants what the state government was going to do is but one example, and the fiasco over the Civic Hall when citizens' views were overruled is another.

Councillors and parliamentarians need to genuinely consider the views of thoughtful constituents who have wide experience and whom have worthy suggestions. Both levels of government need to avoid tokenism and merely going through the motions of consultation. The mere election of people does not ensure wisdom and insights into the future.

Patrick Hope, Buninyong.

I appeal to all climate realists to help implement an important name change into our conversations about the global climate. The terms global warming and climate change are now (in 2016) totally inadequate to describe the dangerous effects of cumulative CO2 emissions into our atmosphere from burning fossil fuels.

Our greenhouse gas emissions have increased massively since this now weak terminology was coined about 30 years ago. Our understandings, discussions, politics, actions and terminology all need to reflect the fact that emissions have reached dangerously high levels.

We are experiencing more extreme weather/climate-related events, and can expect greater extremes each year; more violent storms, record high temperatures, extreme bushfires, deaths from heat-related events, sea level rises, bleaching of coral reefs, impacts on food production, vegetation loss, and so on.

A term that reflects this increasingly frightening phenomenon is "climate emergency", as this emphasises the urgency of actions required to address this threat. Perhaps the standard use of this term will help to break the almost complete silence by community and politicians on the biggest issue we and our children face.

Calling climate change what it really is, might lead to our governments, communities and individuals to mobilise resources and take action with the urgency and co-operation that our climate emergency surely demands.

Jane Marriott, Creswick