Global warming is now an issue that has engaged virtually all world leaders and legislators and produced a powerful environmentalist lobby that is propelling the drive to reduce the production of man-made greenhouse gasses. At their most dramatic, the environmentalists insist this is not some cuddly bourgeois fad like helping endangered species or protecting rain forests. They maintain that it really is a battle to actually save the planet, to halt radical changes to the earth’s atmosphere that, if unchecked, will have profound consequences for all human, animal and plant life.

The urgency of the “issue” of global warming has already had one unfortunate environmental consequence, which is the widespread destruction of debate within the academic and intellectual environment. This had produced a problem. If universities and research institutions are unable to test the data that are underpinning the environmentalists’ campaign, then the effectiveness of the actions and remedies taken to counteract have to be questionable. This is all about science. And its practitioners used to pride themselves on the rigor of scientific method whereby original hypotheses are tested and retested before a result is accepted. And it has always been the nature of science that no result is ever deemed to be absolutely conclusive. Time and again, major advances have been achieved by researchers who have gone back to original data and found they led to new and more exciting results.

Yet to question the current accepted wisdom on the causes of global warming has become a scientific heresy. Eminent researchers have lost their grants, respected scientific journals have shied away from publishing papers that challenge the environmentalists’ arguments and politicians, egged on by a largely uninformed media, are busy pushing the global warming agenda on the basis of expert opinion which they accept without question. In this respect, and in this respect alone, it is hard not to sympathize with the Nazi leader Hermann Goering who is said to have once thundered that whenever he heard the word “expert” he reached for his pistol.

The record temperatures that have so far killed 65 in Japan and hospitalized 22,000 others; the wildfires in Greece in which at least 60 people have already died; the blazes in Sweden even on the edge of the Arctic Circle and the heavy rains in Laos which have brought down a dam with the loss of hundreds of lives, are all being seized on by the environmentalists as proof positive that the planet is heading toward an appalling catastrophe.

Well they may be right. But then again, because they are vigorously rejecting further questioning of their conclusions, their certainty can never be intellectually legitimate. No argument is so good that it cannot benefit from a thorough re-examination.

It is hard to overcome the concern that world leaders and their publics are being stampeded like a herd of wild animals driven by panic. And an animated crowd is rarely capable of making sensible decisions.

The environmentalists are backing major greenhouse gas-mitigation programs because they say that, even if their argument is in any way wrong, the risk of not acting immediately is too great. On the face of it, this is a reasonable argument into which world leaders can buy. But the alarming unreason behind the environmentalists is that they insist there should be no further debate on global warming.