First, then, what is happening? Given that nowadays pretty well every adverse development in the natural world is automatically attributed to global warming, perhaps the most surprising fact about it is that it is not, in fact, happening at all. The truth is that there has so far been no recorded global warming at all this century.

The world’s temperature rose about half a degree centigrade during the last quarter of the 20th century; but even the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research – part of Britain’s Met Office and a citadel of the current global warming orthodoxy – has now conceded that recorded temperature figures for the first seven years of the 21st century reveal there has been a standstill.

The centre now officially expects global warming to resume at some point between 2009 and 2014.

Maybe it will. But the fact that the present lull was not predicted by any of the complex computer models upon which the global warming orthodoxy relies is clear evidence that the science of what determines the world’s temperature is distinctly uncertain and far from “settled”.

What is settled is a bunch of hot-heads on a quest for personal notoriety went off half-cocked and were wrong. There is no need to sugar coat it – they were wrong. And for the second decade their predictions will be wrong. The fact is, they have yet to be right. And they went wrong when they decided, with the science of earth’s climate in its infancy, they knew all they need to know to make those abysmally wrong predictions.

The science of climate is not young, but the ability to see things globally and begin to understand causes on the global scale (let alone continental, etc) has only been in existence since the advent of weather satellites. 30 years is not enough time to grasp the complex physics of a planet. And that is the real lesson here:

Genuine climate scientists admit that Earth’s climate is determined by hugely complex systems, and reliable prediction is impossible.

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The most important greenhouse gas is water vapour, including water suspended in clouds. Rather a long way behind, the second most important is carbon dioxide.

The vast bulk of the carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere is natural – that is, nothing to do with man. But there is no doubt that ever since the Industrial Revolution in the latter part of the 19th century, man has added greatly to atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide by burning carbon – first in the form of coal, and subsequently in the form of oil and gas, too.

So it is reasonable to suppose that, other things being equal, this will have warmed the planet, and that further man-made carbon dioxide emissions will warm it still further.

But in the first place, other things are very far from equal. And in the second place, even if they were, there is no agreement among reputable climate scientists over how much this contributed to the modest late-20th century warming of the planet, and thus may be expected to do so in future.

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It is striking that during the 21st century, carbon dioxide emissions have been growing faster than ever – thanks in particular to the rapid growth of the Chinese economy – yet there has been no further global warming at all.

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Let’s look at just two of the alleged “catastrophic” consequences of global warming: the threat to food production, leading to mass starvation; and the threat to human health, leading to disease and death.

So far as food production is concerned, it is not clear why a warmer climate would be a problem at all. Even the IPCC concedes that for a warming of anything up to 3 per cent, “globally, the potential for food production is projected to increase”. Yes: increase.

As to health, in its most recent report, the IPCC found only one outcome which they ranked as “virtually certain” to happen – and that was “reduced human mortality from decreased cold exposure”.

This echoes a study done by our own Department of Health which predicted that by the 2050s, the UK would suffer an increase in heat-related deaths by 2,000 a year, and a decrease in cold-related mortality of 20,000 deaths a year – something that ministers have been curiously silent about.

Here’s the reality – we need many more decades to unravel this mystery AND for Earth to show us the range of dynamics that make up her cycles and moods. We don’t have the data yet to make the kinds of ludicrous predictions these ‘scientists’ claimed and missed. We know for a fact the models aren’t working and never have. The root cause is arrogance, not a lot of gasses coming from man’s machines.