[Arragonis]

The science is weak. The idea is strong.

But you argued, global warming policies are a matter for economists and, pre-eminently, for democratically elected politicians.

Second, using the IPCC’s own numbers, the case for drastic action rested on people in the developing world being 9.5 times better off than they are today rather than 8.5 times better off if climate change was left to its natural course – a patently absurd proposition to impoverish the present for the benefit of the future.

And third, the superiority of adaptation over trying to cut emissions, because with adaptation you can pocket the benefits of warmer temperatures while reducing the costs of coping with them.

The science is inherently weak because it is not capable of being falsified in the here and now. It is weak because it doesn’t appear to preclude several years of standstill in average global temperature, or even, for all I know, declines in average global temperature. Neither does it preclude it snowing in March – contrary to one of the most famous prophecies made by any climate scientist.

‘Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,’ predicted David Viner of the University of East Anglia in March 2000.

...Come rain or shine, drought or storm, global warming came to acquire the characteristics of phlogiston in the 18th century theory of combustion.

‘Chemists have made phlogiston a vague principle, which is not strictly defined and which consequently fits all the explanations demanded of it,’

The great French scientist Lavoisier wrote ‘Sometimes it has weight, sometimes it has not … Sometimes it passes through the pores of vessels, sometimes they are impenetrable to it … It explains at once causticity and non-causticity, transparency and opacity, colour and the absence of colours.’

It must be conceded that proponents of phlogiston explained their ideas with rather greater elegance than 21st century believers in global weirding. So the science is inherently weak.

Alarm about population growth was popularised by Thomas Malthus at the beginning of the 19th century – a century in which Britain’s population nearly quadrupled; cash wages for factory workers rose 50%; the purchasing power of money doubled; and life expectancy began its long-term increase.

Despite the failure of Malthus’s prediction that population growth would be repeatedly checked by famine, disease and war, for true believers, the idea that there are or will be too many humans is an article of faith.

In 1865, the brilliant economist William Stanley Jevons modified the Malthusian construct. Resource depletion in the form of exhaustion of cheap coal meant the prosperity of Victorian Britain could not last.

Jevons made the mistake that every one of his depletionist successors makes. He had not factored in the impact of new technologies and new discoveries. Jevons convinced himself that the steam engine was the farthest mankind could progress. Electrical power was a delusion and petroleum was merely the liquid essence of coal – and an expensive one at that.

The sudden emergence of environmentalism as a political movement in the post-war world can be dated with precision – to 1962 and publication of Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’. In reality, ‘Silent Spring’ is a work of fiction – and all the more powerful for that. The political impact of environmentalism following ‘Silent Spring’ was immense. I would go so far as to say that ‘Silent Spring’ is the most consequential book of the post-war era. Just ten years separate ‘Silent Spring’ from the first major UN conference on the environment at Stockholm in 1972.