Pitstop on the road trip to Copenhagen. Truth, lies and climate change.

Like 99% of bloggers I ignored the call to post about climate change on the 15th October. Mostly because the whole climate change & global warming "debate" (if it can be characterised as such) has become more akin to some millenarian cult rather than an informed response to scientific enquiry. Just search the phrase "...if we don't act now on climate change" and you'll find endless doomladen scenarios - some from organisations with a specific financial interest in the campaign and other from ordinary people frightened by the apocalyptic predictions of the pundits.

I am sceptical about all this campaigning - not because I wish to deny the self-evident fact of climate change but because of the hubris and the deliberate use of questionable facts to promote one or other favoured outcome. And those who claim there is no climate change are just as bad - as anyone who has read Christopher Booker's Sunday Telegraph column will know!

Before looking at the options facing "the planet" (like the planet gives a monkeys) we should start by disconnecting a great deal of supposed environmental outcomes from the climate change discussion - such as climate change meaning more hurricanes, for example. We should concentrate on the incontrovertible rather than the challengable.

For me there are three options:

1. Run about like chicken licken telling everyone we're all doomed, that whatever the latest boondoggle it is the "last chance" to respond to climate change and that anyone who questions the wisdom should be treated in a manner akin to 17th Century witches (albeit, and in a very modern way, stopping short of burning).

2. Deny the whole climate change argument - it's just a big scam and an excuse for more big government and the introduction of socialism on the back of "saving the planet" (or, if you're Booker, it's all part of the Great European Conspiracy to destroy democracy).

3. Do what humans have always done - respond to changes in our environment by adapting what we do, through technology and by applying our highly developed brains to the problems around us. This doesn't require "co-ordinated international action" or a new raft of regulatory constraints on behaviour. And it does not require more Government just giving ordinary people the incentive to change behaviour.

So let's not waste our time (and other people's money) gathering in Copenhagen to discuss climate change - it's not there that we will find the answers. Let's stop spending millions of "climate change strategies" resourced with expensive officers paid for with taxpayers money. And let's stop the hectoring of ordinary people over their supposed environmental misdeeds.