”I want to believe…”

Pudgy columnist Johann Hari is marshalling a fightback against all those people slowly coming to their senses over the ‘Climagegate’ emails:

Every day, I pine for the global warming deniers to be proved right. I loved the old world – of flying to beaches wherever we want, growing to the skies, and burning whatever source of energy came our way.

Of course, for some people, that world never left, did it?

I’m looking at you, Al Gore. And Bono. And Sting and Mrs Sting.

When I read the works of global warming deniers like Nigel Lawson or Ian Plimer, I feel a sense of calm washing over me. The nightmare is gone; nothing has to change; the world can stay as it was.

But then I go back to the facts. However much I want them to be different, they sit there, hard and immovable.

Well, post-Climategate, maybe not so immovable, eh?

And nobody disputes that the world has become considerably hotter over the past century. (If you disagree with any of these statements, you'd fail a geography GCSE).

Oh, really..?

Yet half our fellow citizens are choosing to believe the deniers who say there must be gaps between these statements big enough to fit an excuse for carrying on as we are. Shrieking at them is not going to succeed.

Our first response has to be to accept that this denial is an entirely natural phenomenon. The facts of global warming are inherently weird, and they run contrary to our evolved instincts. If you burn an odourless, colourless gas in Europe, it will cause the Arctic to melt and Bangladesh to drown and the American Mid-West to dry up? By living our normal lives, doing all the things we have been brought up doing, we can make great swathes of the planet uninhabitable? If your first response is incredulity, then you're a normal human being.

And if your second is ‘So, why are these people lying to me?’, congratulations. You’re smarter than Johann Hari…

But the basic science isn't actually very complicated, or hard to grasp. As more carbon dioxide is pumped into the atmosphere, the world gets warmer. Every single year since 1917 has been hotter than 1917. Every single year since 1956 has been hotter than 1956. Every single year since 1992 has been hotter than 1992. And on, and on.

And before 1917? Why no mention of that, Johann?

As the conservative journalist Hugo Rifkind put it, the Hadley Centre no more discredits climate science than Harold Shipman discredits GPs.

Because after Shipman, nothing changed, right? Everyone just shrugged and went on as before, right?

Well, no. The medical establishment started proceedings to put its own house in order. But the direction the watermelons have taken is a bit different, isn't it?

Part of the confusion in the public mind seems to stem from the failure to understand that two things are happening at once. There has always been – and always will be – natural variation in the climate. The ebb from hot to cold is part of Planet Earth. But on top of that, we are adding a large human blast of warming – and it is disrupting the natural rhythm. So when, in opinion polls, people say warming is "natural", they are right, but it's only one part of the story.

Hmm, remember when an oil spill was an ecological disaster that would ruin coastlines forever? Remember when Chernobal happened, and the scientists predicted that the area would be blighted for hundreds of years?

That's right. None of those things actually came to pass. The world went on.

That's why I won't use the word "sceptic" to describe the people who deny the link between releasing warming gases and the planet getting warmer. I am a sceptic. I have looked at the evidence highly critically, desperate for flaws. The overwhelming majority of scientists are sceptics: the whole nature of scientific endeavour is to check and check and check again for a flaw in your theory or your evidence.

And if that data goes against you, lie, obfuscate and dump it…

Or accuse your opponents (via the ever impartial state broadcaster) of being involved in some huge conspiracy.

So let's – for the sake of argument – make an extraordinary and unjustified concession to the deniers. Let's imagine there was only a 50 per cent chance that virtually all the world's climate scientists are wrong. Would that be a risk worth taking? Are you prepared to take a 50-50 gamble on the habitability of the planet?

Well, if that was the real question, probably not.

But no-one’s arguing that, are they? Humans are adaptable. Why not simply adapt?

Oh. Right. Far too many vested interests, eh?