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16 March 2007updated 03 Aug 2021 8:18am

The last dilemma

The Clangers creator highlights humankind's crucial choice

By Jeremy Dear

The fervent Channel 4 programme “The Great Global Warming Swindle”, produced by the ‘denyers’, and its slating and rejection by the ‘disaster crusaders’, has taken the debate about the likely future of the world out of science, which is necessarily inconclusive, and into the realm of pseudo-religion.

Now you either ‘believe in’ one future or you ‘believe in’ another. Both attitudes are rich with indicative examples but apparently without sufficiently conclusive proof to silence the opposing unbelievers.

Underlying it all is a simple dilemma, one which concerns us all, now.

It is this:-

If we choose to believe the ‘doomsters’, and take the necessary steps to replace global warming with global cooling, civilization will have to revise its priorities and we shall, for a time, be mightily inconvenienced – and if at some later date, it might conceivably be proved to have been unnecessary – then we and our grandchildren will be alive and life on earth will continue.

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If we choose to believe the ‘denyers’, decide that there is nothing to worry about and go on as usual, we shall be very comfortable, thank you – and if it should then become clear that the so-called ‘tipping point’ has passed and it is obvious that global warming has become runaway and irreversible – then we and our grandchildren will be dead and life on earth will cease.

This is not a choice which can be left to politicians. It is our life

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