Climate Change

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. The alarmism and the overstatement have caused the problem. As a group of scientists, including the former chief scientist, have recently warned, alarmist overstatement—a refusal to acknowledge the difficulties and uncertainties—is bad for getting the message over and has a counterproductive effect. When I raised the matter with the hon. Member for Edinburgh, North and Leith (Mark Lazarowicz), he said—as did other people who prompted him—that it was all because of people like me. I would love to believe that I and a handful of others had such silver-tongued eloquence that we were able, with the minimal exposure we are given, to have converted the British people to a degree of scepticism. I do not want to convert them to scepticism about the science. The science is not a fairy tale. The basic science is that if the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is doubled, before the feedbacks are considered that will increase the surface temperature of the atmosphere by 1° C. That is the scientific analysis that any physicist will support. If that higher temperature were to result in more water vapour in the atmosphere, which it does not seem to have done, that would raise the temperature by another 2° C. A doubling of CO2 could have the direct greenhouse effect of raising the temperature by up to 2° C. The Government and the alarmists have to concoct a lot of feedbacks that so far have not manifested themselves to predict that in future we will see far higher rises in temperature from a given increase in CO2 than we have in the past. I am neither a denier of the science nor an alarmist. I am a lukewarmist, if one likes—