Only the future can tell whether these computer projections are real, but to cynics it is clear that IPCC’s Working Group II, which acts more like a political pressure lobby, is piling on “facts” to scare governments into acting to “save the world”.

“The oceans store most of the heat from the Sun, thus tempering the effect on the atmosphere, but the lack of our understanding of the likely effects of the warming of the oceans makes it very difficult to predict the long-term impact,” says a well-known elderly scientist. The panic over a 0.4 per cent rise in global temperature between 1975 and 1998 is being artificially created, asserts another, adding similar rises in earlier centuries have been ignored in preparing these “scaremongering” research papers. Natural events appear more cataclysmic each time because of their effect on a greater global population, and the older a planet gets the less capable it becomes of resisting such events.

When all the talk moved towards the developed world, which burned fossil fuels to stoke industrial revolutions in the last century, coughing up $100 billion to fund emerging economies to reduce carbon footprints, very little came forth save for more hot air in the form of calamity predictions. The belief that wind energy will save the world is largely misplaced while clean nuclear energy is being blindly opposed. The world is bound to end one day, but not likely from global warming.