Plot night, November 5, is over, thank goodness, and if we were an intelligent species we would be determined never to repeat it. It should be socially unacceptable, even illegal, to burn wood unnecessarily.

The reason is quite simple – the analysis of wood shows that half of it is made of carbon and the rest is mainly oxygen, so it’s an excellent way of taking CO2 from the atmosphere. Burning puts it back.

A pine, oak or plane tree will use at least one tonne of CO2 to mature, and so we would personally need nine trees every year to cancel our UK contribution to climate change, while it’s over twenty trees for each American.

Because we need to keep the volume of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere low, close to 350 parts per million, rather than the current rate of 410, and still rising by at least two every year, we must have more trees and leave more wood unburned.

So carbon is best left in trees that are growing, often for more than a century, and every house that has a garden should have at least one tree in it. They could even be apple and plum trees providing a boost to our diets, but other trees will provide shade, look beautiful and reduce flooding.

Depending on the season mature trees can take up many tens of gallons of water daily and this will certainly help reduce the impact of the heavier rainfall that is now becoming normal with the warming climate.

Wood is an excellent house building material, preserving all that carbon in the walls, the floors and the roof for years, and it’s the norm in the USA, Canada and Scandinavia. However in the UK we cut down our forests, often for sheep or pheasants, and so we now use stone and bricks, the latter producing large volumes of CO2 from the clay mining and firing at high temperatures.

A thoughtful government would reforest all the UK moors and hills for the benefit of all living species, including us.