The thin green line: cross it at your peril

It was when I saw an internet tweet comparing me to Nick Griffin — with 2,000 people signed up to it — that I realised just how much trouble I was in.

It was when I saw an internet tweet comparing me to Nick Griffin — with 2,000 people signed up to it — that I realised just how much trouble I was in. My sin: I had written an opinion piece entitled ‘Is global warming hot air?’ I’d wanted to see if my 18,000 architect readers agreed with the line now adopted by the Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba) that ‘man-made’ climate change is the greatest challenge facing the profession. Given that about a third of them have lost their jobs in this recession and some will never work again, I wondered if the institute might not have some more immediate issues to address.

Privately, many architects question whether the emphasis on making all homes ‘zero carbon’ by 2016 while ignoring the carbon that is produced during construction is the best solution. But even if the earth is warming and man-made carbon emissions are to blame, there is still disagreement about how to tackle it.

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The moment in the ‘grooming gangs’ debate that shamed Jess Phillips

As rival magazines started to crank out the usual unquestioning pieces in the run-up to Copenhagen, I doubted if all architects agreed with their institute’s line. I had recently talked to a scientist, newly retired from the Met Office, who said he thought the emphasis on CO2 concentration was ‘misplaced’ and told me, off the record, that the Met’s new computerised climate models did not tally with the old models.

I wrote my column suggesting that the reason so few architects had turned up to listen to Hillary Benn, the Energy Secretary, was ‘a weariness with a government that trots out the same line year after year — that climate change is predominantly man-made — without allowing this claim to be challenged, and despite the growing wealth of scientific evidence that it is not’.