There is no doubt that the climate is changing. Nor is there any doubt that the significant preponderance of scientific opinion avers that the cause is the emission of ‘greenhouse’ gases — principally methane from animal cultivation and carbon dioxide from combustion of ‘fossil’ fuels. These result from human industrialisation and current patterns of human consumption.

What we need to understand is what is and what is not causing that change. The changes required to bring emissions to levels that will maintain global warming to within target limits set globally through scientific consensus will be enormously expensive. They will not be incurred equally. But, even in developed countries, the costs of shifting energy technologies to net-zero carbon emissions will be staggering.

We need to be sure we have understood the need for change, the science of climate and modelling that science, the validity of the data we are using, uncertainties in climate models and cost models, and that science, rather than ideology, is driving calls from change.

Claims that the science is ‘settled’ are both disputable and irrelevant. Science is never settled; it is and must always be, provisional, awaiting incommensurable evidence and refutation. In the debate on anthropogenic causes of climate change, false claims of scientific consensus have been both unproductive and irrelevant.