News that we finally had an agreement at last week’s UN sponsored Climate Change Conference in Mexico left me unmoved.
No less than 15,000 delegates from 194 countries took over a vast hotel complex in Cancun for two weeks and generated enough hot air between them to melt an ice shelf or two.
But they did agree that temperatures should be prevented from rising by more than two degrees centigrade above preindustrial levels - although quite how, they did not make clear.
Cynics have pointed out that after the failure of last year’s Copenhagen conference, delegates were almost as eager to save their own jobs as the planet they live on.
And I do suspect the vast, money-making juggernaut the whole debate has become.
One time Presidential hopeful, Al Gore, has built a career out of public speaking on the subject, with his film, ‘An Inconvenient Truth.’
The inconvenient truth now appears to be that much of what he said was wrong.
Many of his ‘facts’, like those bandied about by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were distortions, at best.
Unfortunately, they seem to have been swallowed by many of our broadcasters who seem, collectively, to have lost their critical faculties on this subject.
Anyone who dares to voice a doubt is described as a climate change ‘denier’. This is language used to denote racist bigots, not people who aren’t sure they’ve heard the whole story.
The real deniers are those who imagine we can survive using windpower and recycled cooking oil until a realistic alternative to oil is found.
Happily, there’s a slow but irresistible movement towards a more balanced view.
Rising sea levels are less catastrophic than originally feared.
Methane build up and water vapour are as globally warming as CO2.
The infamous hockey stick graph, which estimated temperatures over the past 1000 years, and on which the IPCC relied, has been debunked by its own creator.
Permafrost surveys show that there have been periods on earth when CO2 levels were greater and temperatures warmer, than now.
And just this week, the doomsday scenario of a gulf stream ‘shut off’, which would have plunged us into an immediate ice age, has been cancelled due to new data.
But we must not be complacent. We must focus all our efforts on searching for a clean, safe fuel, while reducing our carbon emissions.
I’m not convinced that means sending 15,000 delegates to Mexico.