It may seem a happy coincidence for the government that the storms came just a couple of weeks before the expiry of the fuel protesters' 60-day deadline. Michael Meacher, the environment minister, seized the opportunity to warn us that "climate change is not some trendy intellectual scenario for the future; it is with us now". Oddly, he complained that, during the September fuel crisis, "hardly anyone mentioned the environment", as though he were not a member of a government that, at the time, consistently refused to play the green card.

Instead, ministers insisted on saying that we needed high fuel taxes to pay for schools and hospitals; more recently, we have been told, confusingly, that it is all to do with inflation or the national debt. But the argument has always been primarily an environmental one: that, after all, was why the Tories originally introduced the fuel tax escalator. To now play the environmental card in the wake of the storms, however, looks merely opportunistic. For one thing, people may wonder if ministers would be nearly so exercised if floods and falling trees had not hit London and the Home Counties with particular severity. For another, if the wet, warm, stormy autumn is succeeded by a cold, dry, calm winter, they may conclude that Mr Meacher had it all wrong and that Land Rovers may once more be driven without inhibition.

A comparison with BSE may seem an unlikely one but it is instructive. Whitehall is now being criticised for insufficient panic over BSE: at the first news of an unsteady cow, it is argued, ministers should have alerted the public that beef-eaters ran the risk of poisoning themselves. But Whitehall has been trying, on and off for many years, to make people panic over global warming. If you don't stop driving your cars, ran the message, you will all drown. The public, however, paid no heed. This was because they correctly calculated that somebody else was more likely to drown, most probably in Bangladesh rather than Bognor Regis, Madagascar rather than Merthyr Tydfil.

What is revealed here is an inadequacy of political discourse. First, politicians have lost the capacity to address issues of social and communal responsibility; so strong has been the emphasis on individual fulfilment, individual preferences and individual rights (in public services such as education and health, as well as in the private sector) that it has become almost impossible to ask people to take a wider view. Second, politicians have never acquired the capacity to address scientific issues. Politics deals in the language of certainties: complete assurances, firm pledges, categorical denials. Science speaks a quite different language: one of tentative conjectures, working hypotheses and provisional theories. In complete contrast to politics, where all important statements depend on conviction ("we shall fight them on the beaches"; "there is no such thing as society"; "I have an irreducible core"), all significant scientific statements depend on evidence. A political idea is all the more robust for being beyond disproof - as Marxism's survival for most of the 20th century shows - whereas a scientific idea doesn't count as science at all unless it is falsifiable.

Politicians can cope with arguments about, say, criminal sentencing policy because, in the end, no figures about crime rates will change anybody's views about whether the justice system should give priority to deterrence or rehabilitation. Likewise, advocates of progressive or traditional school teaching methods won't be persuaded by exam results, as their views ultimately depend on what they think education ought to be about. But nobody argues that it is a good idea for the population to eat poisoned beef or for the planet to be made unfit for human habitation. Politicians therefore fall back on such foolishly categorical statements as British beef is safe to eat or too much fuel use causes tornadoes in Bognor. Neither statement is or was false; but neither could ever be said to be true. Science is not like that. There was evidence by the early 1990s consistent with the hypothesis that BSE could cross from cows to humans. The public should have been told to heed it. Now there is evidence consistent with the hypothesis that carbon dioxide emissions lead to a dangerous rise in global temperatures. The public should be told to heed that, too, and be reminded of the catastrophic consequences if the hypothesis proves right. But the message needs to be clear and consistent, and not trotted out as just another political declaration when it happens to fit the week's news agenda.

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