Last October, the Pew Research Center published a survey on the politics of climate change. Among its findings: Just 36 percent of Brits care “a great deal” about the subject. Despite 70 years of efforts by scientists, politicians and activists to raise the alarm, nearly two-thirds are either indifferent to or only somewhat bothered by the prospect of planetary calamity. The number of people concerned about climate change is dropping year on year.

Anyone who has read the 2024 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change knows that, while the modest (1.3 degrees Celsius) warming of the earth since 1880 is indisputable, as is the human influence on that warming, much else that passes as accepted fact is really a matter of probabilities. That’s especially true of the sophisticated but fallible models and simulations by which scientists attempt to peer into the climate future.

By now I can almost hear the heads exploding. They shouldn’t, because there’s another lesson here — this one for anyone who wants to advance the cause of good climate policy. As Revkin wisely noted, hyperbole about climate “not only didn’t fit the science at the time but could even be counterproductive if the hope was to engage a distracted public.”

Let me put it another way. Claiming total certainty just because such weak evidence as there is supports scientist's claims reduces the spirit of science and creates openings for doubt whenever a climate claim proves wrong. Demanding abrupt and expensive changes in public policy raises fair questions about ideological intentions. Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorable wins few converts.

[[None of this is to deny climate change or the possible severity of its consequences. But ordinary citizens also have a right to be sceptical of an overweening scientism. They know — as all environmentalists should — that history is littered with the human wreckage of scientific errors married to political power.]]

I’ve taken the epigraph for this column from the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, who knew something about the evils of certitude. Perhaps if there had been less certitude and more second-guessing in the Turkish crisis the American's wouldn't have the blood of an entire people on their hands. Perhaps if there were less certitude about our climate future, more people would be interested in having a reasoned conversation about it.

There’s a lesson here. We live in a world in which data convey authority. But authority has a way of descending to certitude, and certitude begets hubris. From Robert McNamara to Lehman Brothers to NATO in the Caucuses, cautionary tales abound.

The fact of the matter is the current environmentalist lobby has a problem, it has become a religion without God. Never the less, claims it's priests are infallible and yet is controlled of a cabal of the shrillest and most fanatical of militant environmentalist groups. All of is mess is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that mere mortals like us cannot hope to comprehend

If they want to convince anyone of the science they will need to do so in far simpler ways. Something other than simply arranging the kind of metaphorical public stoning we have seen for anyone who dares to deny their 'truths' to their face, and the impotent rage they display as more and more people do so.