This encapsulates the current relationship between science and the media and, given that this relationship is, in most democratic countries at least, a key element in the link between science and politics, it is worth exploring in some depth. In essence, the problem lies in the cardinal rules of journalism:

• make things simple
• make things variable
• make things easy to read or comprehend
• if possible make things sensational

There are, naturally, many points of contact between journalism and scientific investigation and analysis. Both involve the pursuit of facts, supposedly with honesty and fearless integrity. But there are a number of crucial differences. For a start, while scientific specialists go ever deeper into intricacies of discovery, it is the journalist's business to simplify in order to communicate.

This is not such a dishonest activity as the general unpopularity of the press suggests. Just as there is very little point in trying to communicate Plato's Theory of Ideas to citizens of Bangladesh in ancient Greek, there is very little point in trying to communicate Einstein's Theory of Relativity to the completely innumerate in a series of extensive equations. It is better to get some of the ideas across by dressing them up in words, even if matters do get simplified.

Yet this leads to another conflict between science and the media. The prime and central rule of editing is that "more means less." In essence, any program maker, sub-editor of a newspaper, or magazine writer knows that humanity has extremely diverse interests, and the objective is to get as many humans as possible to read the newspaper or watch the program. Complexity in news-gathering is sacrificed to variety. Complexity in one story prevents the publication of another story. It also loses readers. This applies not merely to content, but also to language.

There is a game occasionally played in newsrooms in which a piece of writing is analyzed on a scale of points. The longer the sentence, the more points are deducted from the score. The ideal sentence, and one that scores maximum points, is four words long. The point of the exercise is to demolish the subordinate clauses from all existence and to minimize the space used to tell the story.

To illustrate this technique, let us try it on the notorious conclusions of chapter 8 of the Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The original statement goes as follows:

Nevertheless, the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate.

This is 16 words. Well, since the "nevertheless" relates to something else unread, forget it. The "balance of" seems a little unnecessary too, after all there is "evidence." "That there is" is redundant, since in tabloid speak "that" is always a waste of space. If we lose "that" we don't need the "a." The word "discernible" is not really needed, because—well—if it wasn't "discernible" we would not know about it, would we? So we get left with:

The evidence suggests human influence on global climate.

This is eight words, but still too long. We could miss out the "global," of course, and "influence" is a three syllable word. We could use "change" instead. "Evidence" sounds a little dry, how about "scientists" to add the human touch? And "say" sounds better than "suggests." So we now have:

Scientists say humans change climate.

Only five words! At this point, the editor might say that scientists are always saying things, so what makes this so important? Well it is the IPCC report, so they are official scientists of some kind, so why not write:

Official scientists say humans change climate?

This, alas, seems to lack punch. Why not put the official at the end to give it more clout?

Scientists say humans change climate: Official.

This is, naturally, a joke version of the process, but it is an uncannily accurate description as to what has in practice happened to the Chapter 8 summary. Its meaning has been magnificently changed. All doubts have been expunged. Virtually all those involved in the writing of the IPCC report have been rather taken aback by the monumental "dumbing down" that has happened to their words.

The trouble is that the global warming story is tailor-made for sensationalism. In practice, media sensationalism is singularly ill-fitted to deal with an issue like climate change. Sensationalism is really about unique and strange events. "Man bites dog" is news because it happens so rarely. By contrast the whole problem of climate change—if it is happening—is that it is a process taking place over a considerable period of time. The weather is not climate. The weather is defined by events, storms, rainy days, snow at Christmas, hot days at the seaside. Climate is defined by weather patterns over the year and climate change is about changing weather patterns over years and years and years.

The ordinary cannot compete with the exciting single event. Number series are not as valuable in attracting interest as the single unusual event. As a result, the entire global warming debate has tended to be dominated by a combination of (a) single real events—typhoons, annual insurance returns, droughts, El Niņo, a rash of four-leaf clovers in Ireland etc—and (b) a rash of statistical speculation, generated by scientific inquiry that piles unprovable extrapolation on unprovable extrapolation. Aside from southern England becoming the wine barrel of Europe, as everybody knows, three tenths of the world's population will be subsumed under 5 metres of water without, apparently, being given any chance to run away.

Just as the ordinary cannot compete with the exciting, so, too, it is much more difficult to prove a negative than it is to prove a positive. And this has a major consequence for the global warming debate. It would be difficult to find a scientist—and even more difficulty to find a politician—who would say categorically that global climate change is not a possibility. It is a much easier to attack the consistency of a model, the process of scientific procedure, and provide countervailing evidence in the current debate than it is to pronounce that "Scientists say that mankind has no effect at all on the climate. Official!"

The scientific argument is very unlikely to reach the point where science can univocally state that this is all a lot of fuss about absolutely nothing. What it can do is to try to put some parameters around the wilder forms of speculation and so inform the political debate, which now is being driven by sensationalism.

The whole global warming debate—as driven by environmental pressure groups and the press—centres on the assumptions that we have little time for change and that we only have one solution to the issue: the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions enforced by limits defined by international law and applied only to the world's most developed economies. Both these assumptions are wrong. Away from the headlines, a great deal is being done, certainly in the field of energy, to transform the level of polluting emissions per capita and per unit of GDP. More importantly, the process is largely led by the market and does not have very much to do with the debate about emissions at all.

Consider, for example, which countries have managed to make their Rio targets on emissions. There are 4: the United Kingdom, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine. Why have these managed to reach the target? The short answer is that the United Kingdom destroyed its coal industry, largely for political reasons, and went at enormous speed towards gas-fired combine cycle electricity generation. In Germany, following the fall of the Berlin wall, the former East Germany's industrial economy crashed. Heavy industry collapsed and heavy industry's energy consumption fell off. Much the same thing happened in Russia and the Ukraine, only the situation was a good deal worse. In 1987, the Soviet Union used 8.4 million barrels a day of crude oil. One decade later, the area that comprises the former Soviet Union uses 4.3 million barrels a day. Russian demand for energy virtually halved in 10 years as its economic infrastructure fell to the ground.

The Rio targets, therefore, were met largely because of a general downturn in the economy or a one-off event. The British are now beginning to increase emissions above Rio targets. If questioned about it, environmental ministers point out that the problem is extremely fast economic growth. Indeed a slogan for the entire process could be: "Beat those Rio targets; trash your economy now!"

When one looks at the global figures, the damage to national economies becomes increasingly evident. There was only a 6.4 percent increase in CO2 emissions from fossil fuels world-wide between 1990 and 1996 (World Energy Council) because the former Soviet Union and central Europe decreased their emissions by 31 percent. The OECD countries increased them by 7.8 percent, while the developing world increased them by 32 percent, largely lead by the booming economies of south-east Asia.

In short, combustion and CO2 emission are heavily interconnected with economic success or failure. Unfortunately, there is a remarkable absence of much literate economic discussion about the consequences of carbon emission reduction. In fact, the entire trade and economic dimension of the climate change issue has been largely ignored in public.

Much the same goes for the press response. For obvious reasons, most newspapers and networks now have their own environment correspondents. For reasons equally obvious, these tend to relate most directly to the environmental pressure groups who bring them their daily diet of news stories. There are, I hasten to add, a number of excellent exceptions, but I was astonished at the treatment meted out by the London press to Brian Fisher, Executive Director of the Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics. His agency had put together an economic analysis of the impact of mandatory carbon emission limits on the Australian economy and his message was simple enough. He said that a 10 percent reduction by 2010 would destroy 50 percent of Australia's non-ferrous metals industry.

The response was anything but intelligent and ranged from accusations of special pleading to questions as to what he would say to the President of Fiji when his country sank beneath the waves. It did not occur to the assembled press pack that a state has a legitimate right to examine what may or may not be good for its citizens, regardless of what happens to another country.

Slowly, people are waking up to the profound implications of attempting to limit carbon emissions by international law and confining this to the OECD group of developed countries plus the former eastern bloc, together known as the Annex I group. Needless to say, the non-Annex I countries have one single and utterly coherent policy. They want nothing to do with reducing emissions. Yet the non-Annex I countries are fairly crucial to the whole debate because double-digit growth is commonplace throughout the developing world.

The level of industrial transfer from the OECD to the developing world is particularly fascinating. The Australians have noted the capacity of heavy industrial companies to shift their activities to other countries, if impeded at home. Naturally this process is a healthy one for the world and helps development. What is less healthy is if this process is accelerated by legal binding limits on carbon emissions, when the beneficiaries of the shift have no limits at all. All that happens is that the date when non-Annex I countries exceed the per capita emissions of the OECD comes much quicker.

This is the persistent irony about the global warming debate. Those countries most capable of developing the technologies necessary to reduce carbon emissions are those most likely to suffer from the economic impact of any mandatory limit on such emissions and thus slow down their R&D effort. They will do so as a result of the migration of capital. Equally, those economies that have both the most persistent pollution problems generally, the most rapid rate of carbon emission growth, and the least capacity for major R&D effort are not involved in the limitations to be discussed at the Kyoto summit in December.

Quite frankly, I am not qualified to judge whether humanity is having a significant effect on global climate through carbon emissions. However, observing the debate since the mid-1980s it does seem apparent that the apocalypse is not going to happen tomorrow or abruptly. After 15 years of analyzing energy trends and technologies, we do not yet have the technical capability to reduce carbon emissions without significantly affecting economic growth. And at the very least, that part of the equation must be calculated and well understood by the public before we take any further precipitous action to limit carbon emissions.