Denying the storms

There are few people less sceptical than "climate change sceptics." If there is an impossible theory or bonkers idea going, they will be willing to seize it with both hands as long as it confirms their prejudices.

It seems there is a world conspiracy of scientists, governments, Greenpeace and the BBC, all co-ordinated by David Attenborough, who without having met each other or even communicated have come up with a dastardly plan designed to convinced the rest of the world that the planet is getting hotter.

Why? In order to raise taxes, apparently.

I have to say, though, if there is a conspiracy between such a vast array of luminaries, I'd be very disappointed to find out that they had such poverty of ambition that they simply put this scheme to work in order to raise taxes, like a global version of speed cameras.

I mean, there was always the option of, well, raising taxes to achieve the same ends without the need for that secret headquarters in the volcano or anything.

Sadly, for a set of ideas that are the bastard son of the Daily Express and Jeremy Clarkson, climate change denial is becoming increasingly respectable. So much so that not only has the media debate shifted back to whether climate change is happening at all, public opinion has moved significantly in the last six months.

According to a BBC poll published at the weekend, just one in four people are now convinced that climate change is happening and that mankind is contributing to that process. That's the same number of people that don't believe it is happening at all. This latter group includes members of the shadow cabinet who may shortly be in charge of negotiating international climate targets.

There's no question that some of this shift is down to the UEA email leaks that seemed to show that scientists in UEA's Climate Research Unit were covering up awkward evidence and were partisan in their opposition to climate deniers. It's got to the stage that any error on the part of any climatologist, like recent inaccurate predictions over the Himalayan glaciers, becomes more evidence that perhaps it's all hogwash. This ignores the fact that scientists make mistakes and it's the cumulative collation of data that's important, not any single prediction or study.

The mistake that the deniers make is that even in the worst-case scenario - if the UEA Climate Research Unit was simply a propaganda unit for climate change "believers," which certainly is not the case - one set of scientists getting things wrong does not discount the enormous weight of evidence gathered across the world by a myriad different organisations over decades.

It's the cumulative body of peer-reviewed journals, reproducible studies and scientific consensus that matters. In this case we have 30 years of evidence that is coherent and comprehensive.

Scientific understanding advances through disproving, amending and building on the collective work of the scientific community. Individual errors are a day-to-day fact of scientific research and unless someone comes up with a better method to understand the world, we're stuck with the messy fact that science is conducted by fallible human beings.

Anyone who wants to be taken seriously has to look facts in the face rather than simply believing what they want to believe. What the science does not do, of course, is give one clear course of action as to what we do about it. That's the role of politics.

Different people put forward different solutions - cap and trade, radical depopulation measures, international climate deals or abolishing capitalism and replacing it with a sustainable economic system based on social justice and genuine democracy.

There's disagreement on the way forward and scientists are no better or worse placed to choose which is the way forward. That's up to all of us using the facts as a guide.

However, the denialists had obviously heard that when it comes to facts nothing is better than scientific evidence, so they base their ideas on nothing. Denialist literature is so full of misunderstandings, lies and fog that you're doing well when you find a half-truth.

The funding of much of the opposition's research comes from oil companies, which have taken a leaf out of the tobacco lobby's book by funding researchers to tie up the argument for years while they continue to pile up the profits. It's no accident that much of the debate is confusing or difficult to follow.

It's also no wonder that some people don't want to believe that climate change is a clear and present danger. The problem seems just too big to handle, especially when the most practical advice revolves around recycling your drink cans or switching your light bulbs. Compared to the problem it just seems so futile.

It's easier to believe that climate change isn't happening than it is to accept we have to change the way society runs.

It's the same reason that people don't think about the millions who are starving around the world - it's a horrible fact that we feel helpless to influence.

That's why sowing the seeds of doubt has been such a powerful weapon in the hands of denialists. The doubts don't have to make sense. They only have to be enough for those who don't want to believe to cling onto.

So when you hear people come out with things like "But January was cold so the world is clearly not getting hotter," it can be slightly frustrating.

Partly because man-made global warming means weather will become increasingly unpredictable and extreme, not uniformly warmer, partly because January saw record highs in the southern hemisphere and partly because single facts do not disprove trends.

Or when people, often the same people, cite the idea that global temperatures have always varied naturally so what we're seeing is just the Earth doing what it normally does.

If you're going to say that rising temperatures are down to natural processes there needs to be a scientifically verifiable counter-case showing how the rise in temperatures is indeed down to natural variation. This has never been done convincingly so there is no particular reason to believe it.

No-one denies there have been warm periods and ice ages, but they were down to specific, verifiable factors, not just a change in mood like Picasso's blue period or the fashion for shorter skirts.

Ultimately, even if the argument to doubt the scientific consensus was won and catastrophic climate change was only a possibility rather than an observable fact, it's hardly a reason not to do anything about it.

If I walk across the road without looking I might not get knocked down, but this is not a satisfactory argument against the green cross code.