Let’s call it the black box syndrome: making revolutionary changes or new products without any real handle on what has actually been created or the potential impact. No-one really knew what the risks were when the wizards of Wall Street launched the inscrutable credit products that led to the current financial bubble that is now imploding, rocking the world economy.

Now we have something akin to that bubble building in the environmental arena, in the inflated rhetoric on global warming rising inexorably from the environmental-political complex. Global warming is a fact. The great questions are not whether the environment is gradually warming but whether it will persist and if so what can or should be done about it – and at what costs.

Alarmists-by-anecdote invoke Katrina, melting ice caps and death-by-heatstroke as signs of the end of the world as we know it. “It has been harder and harder to misinterpret the signs that our world is spinning out of kilter,” Al Gore said last year in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize.

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Novotel West Hotel, London, Evening of 4th May 2010
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