We scarcely need our fifth freezing winter in a row to remind us of the probability that future generations may look back on the panic over global warming which suddenly gripped the world in the late 1980s as one of the oddest scientific and political aberrations in history. Why did such an unprecedented scare blow up when it did, thanks to a moderate rise of just 0.5 degrees C in global temperatures, when earlier in the 20th century a similar temperature rise between 1910 and 1940 had been accepted as perfectly natural: as simply another phase in the general warming trend which had begun 200 years earlier, after four centuries of the ‘Little Ice Age’ when the world had cooled?
Future historians may be amazed by the speed with which this belief that the entire future of life on the planet was threatened by human emissions of carbon dioxide became the prevailing orthodoxy of the time. Less than four years after it began making world headlines in 1988 it led to the largest conference the world had ever seen, when more than 100 heads of government gathered in Rio, to agree that the human race must take drastic steps to reduce its emissions of a gas inseparable from almost all the activities of modern industrial civilisation.
They will see how for a while this belief carried all before it, as CO2 levels and temperatures continued to rise, just as had been predicted by the computer models relied on by that unique body set up by the UN to become the central driver of the scare, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But gradually, as the politicians of Europe and America proposed ever more dramatic measures to meet the supposed threat, it became clear that temperatures were no longer rising as the official computer models said they should.
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