Season of humbug and hot air

I don’t doubt that the Earth is getting hotter. Perhaps we’ll make it a lot hotter still. Perhaps there might be another Ice Age later on, and then a further bout of warming. The current debate is perplexing, not least when normally intelligent and essentially kindly people turn into witch-hunters declaring that debate is over. The most lukewarm sceptics, it seems, must be branded “climate deniers”, declared anathema and silenced.

Perhaps the writings of anyone daring to call for substantial debate should be burned in public squares to keep the flames white in the fiery breasts of the Environmentally Righteous. And, by extension, the Absolutely Right.

One of the last times those in charge of a country, and those supporting them, believed they had such absolute knowledge, the end result was the gas chambers. As Jacob Bronowski said, looking into the camera from the crematorium at Auschwitz: “Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known, we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgement in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal… we have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge.”

Whatever the extent to which humans are to blame for global warming, we have an age-old, and not just a sudden duty to act as stewards of the planet and its species. We have an instinct to preserve our own destructive kind, yet the onus has always been on us to look after the world around us, from crops and forests to creeping things inhabiting deep-sea funnels and dogs, now accused by architects — in a heavy-handed joke — as more environmentally damaging than 4x4s.

Perhaps birds produce too much hot air with all their flapping. Perhaps fish warm oceans with their frenetic swimming. Kill them all, and save the planet for greedy Homo sapiens.

Greedy? While politicians and their courts — all 20,000 of them — flock, by jet, to Copenhagen to discuss climate change in five-star, slap-up, air-conditioned executive luxury, the British contingent supports a new runway at Heathrow. Stansted and Gatwick, too. Meanwhile, Tesco, as the Times reveals, is to put in as many planning applications as possible in coming months up and down the country.

And, as we extend our airports and build ever more unnecessary supermarkets, we buy ever more stuff, most of it plastic-wrapped and “digital” that we know we’ll throw away all too soon. Few, though, dare to criticise giant, plasma-screen TVs, fashion-focused laptops, footballers’ cars or cheap holidays in other peoples’ misery, to name a handful of unsustainable nonsense.

It’s time to take stock, and to promise ourselves free debate and freedom from humbug, and, while we’re at it, and if we’re serious about looking after Britain and the planet, why don’t we just stop buying ever more junk and stop approving and building so many demeaning and unsustainable projects?