President Obama is gravely concerned; Gordon Brown and David Cameron are agreed that something must be done; the EU is united in the view that urgent action is needed. The problems of climate change and the threat of global warming have, over the past two decades, taken a unique role on the world stage.
Even the threat of nuclear annihilation never seemed to be taken as seriously as this. Yet as the world gears up for next month's Copenhagen conference on climate change, it is time to ask a few questions.
Is the world really getting hotter? If it is, to what extent is it caused by our burning of fossil fuels? Are polar bears facing extinction because of man's selfishness? Or has the entire world gone stark staring mad?
In his new book, The Real Global Warming Disaster, Christopher Booker tells the remarkable tale of the inexorable rise of global warming to the top of the international agenda. With the pace and intrigue of an espionage thriller, he analyses the political and scientific shenanigans that have led the world down a path which he claims is hurtling towards a disaster far greater than the one it is designed to prevent.
So who is right? Is global warming a firmly established scientific fact, denied only by an ever-decreasing bunch of loony sceptics such as Booker, or is it, as Booker maintains, creating the most costly scientific blunder in history?
The story of the obsession of the age began in the eighties when the UN set up its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In the cold mid-seventies there had been a great scare that the world was heading for a new ice age. But now the weather had improved and warming had become the great threat.
The first report of the IPCC, published in 1990, began with all the caution one expects in a scientific paper but rapidly turned into something closer to a disaster movie script with a scenario of floods, drought, and diseases that might happen around the world if global warming continued unchecked.
Note that word "might". Scientist knew that carbon dioxide had a warming effect; they knew that human activity was increasing its levels but the precise effect was impossible to know. The disaster script was the worst-case scenario but the media and politicians lapped it up.
But who were the IPCC anyway? Supposedly they were 1,500 top climate scientists, soberly weighing up the evidence for and against human-induced climate change. "In fact," Booker says, "the IPCC was never intended to be anything of the kind. The vast majority of contributors have never been climate scientists. Many are not scientists at all. And from the start the purpose of the IPCC was not to test the theory but to provide the most plausible case for promoting it."
They had every reason to do so. The more disasters they predicted, the more politicians panicked and the more they justified their own role. In a few years, global warming had grown from an untested theory into a secular religion.
By the time of the Kyoto conference in 1997, the global warming movement had engendered something indistinguishable from religious fervour in its supporters. carbon was the great sin for which forgiveness could only be obtained by paying money for carbon credits. Quite how that was meant to reduce emissions was anybody's guess but carbon trading has become very big business, adding yet more carriages to the global warming bandwagon.
The world's politicians fell over one another to promise answers to the problem and make greater promises to establish their green credentials. "The true believers in global warming," writes Booker, "exhibited a moralistic fanaticism, justified by the transcendent importance of their cause." Any who dared question them were denounced as heretics.
But what of the proposed solutions? Wind farms, as booker makes very clear, are extremely expensive and inefficient. Because they work only when the wind is blowing, wind farms need the back-up of coal-fired power stations, which actually increases CO2 emissions. Perhaps if the entire country was covered with wind farms they could supply all our energy needs - but at what cost?
Then there are biofuels. According to Booker, making fuel out of crops uses more energy than it creates. In any case, if Britain is to deliver its promised targets on biofuel production, it would need to give up 70% of its agricultural land to growing them. Save the planet - give up food.
"The world's politicians," Booker tells u, "led by Britain, the EU, and now President Obama, are poised to impose on us far and away the most costly set of measures that any group of politicians has ever proposed in the history of the world - measures so destructive that even if only half of them were implemented, they would take us back to the Dark Ages."
In 2007, Al Gore was awarded an Oscar and the Nobel Peace Prize for his contributions to the global warming debate, yet as Booker and many others have pointed out, his award winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, is packed with very dubious science. His graphs linking CO2 and temperature are based on discredited scientific papers. Even his emotionally charged pictures of drowned Polar Bears are out of context. Those shown simply died in a storm. In fact polar bear numbers are higher now than they have been for years.
And is it still really getting warmer? Much of the present activity was triggered when 1998 was identified as the hottest year ever, but it has actually been getting colder since then. Last year, our politicians were even debating the Climate Change Bill during the worst October snowfall London had seen for years.Yet despite the chill in the air only two MPs questioned whether the measures in the bill were truly necessary. Sea levels, despite predictions, have not risen in the past decade, and while atmospheric CO2 has continued to increase, temperatures have actually fallen.
Professor Richard Lindzen who, unlike many in the IPCC, is a leading atmospheric scientist, writes: "Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century's developed world went into a hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree and... proceeded to contemplate a rollback to the industrial age.
Gordon Brown very recently said, we have "less than fifty days" to save the planet. But perhaps it is the politicians the planet needs saving from, not the threat of global warming.
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