Now, I am a flat-earther

According to Gordon Brown, I am a flat-earther. His little friend, David Milliband, thinks that I and others like me are environmental vandals. Other members of the Climate Change Community are of the view that global warming sceptics ( Deniers) should be subjected to compulsory re-education; shades of Winston Smith in "1984". One particularly well-balanced individual writing in today's Independent Online opined that Deniers are more evil than Hitler and Stalin and guilty of a crime more heinous than genocide; Ecocide, which sounds vaguely like an organic garden product.

This is the level of emotional and personal odium that anyone who admits to doubting climate change has to suffer these days. None of us, apparently, has reached this state through free will, individual study or contemplation. No, we are all the unwitting tools of a capitalist conspiracy orchestrated and funded by the fat cats of the global oil and gas industry.

Climate change is so much the conventional wisdom that the BBC, as an example, does not see any point in admitting, let alone publicising, the possibility of an alternative point of view. If any of its reporters do acknowledge that there are a few dissenters out there, they do so with the tone of voice and pitying expression normally reserved for reports about UFO nuts or recipients of Care in the Community.

Take the latest furore regarding the leak of e-mails from the University of East Anglia. The story bruted about by most papers and, certainly the BBC, was that these e-mails came to light as a result of someone hacking into the university's computer.

Apparently the e-mails were "stolen" by some organisation ( possibly the Russian Secret Service) in an attempt to disrupt or discredit the Copenhagen Conference. In fact, the UN's climate change guru, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, maintained in his opening speech that "The recent incident of stealing the emails of scientists at the University of East Anglia shows that some would go to the extent of carrying out illegal acts perhaps in an attempt to discredit the IPCC," (International Panel on Climate Change).

Wow. So, now we have it. The Russians have joined forces with Texas Oil barons, the Saudis and other members of the International Capitalist Conspiracy. This group has hacked into the UEA's computers and discovered, buried in over a decade's worth of e-mails, a highly-selective few that discredit or at least call into question, some dubious practices by the leading exponents of Climate Change theory.

There are several problems with this theory. One is so obvious that I am surprised it has only just occurred to me. Namely, unless they knew there was something worth hacking for, why would they have bothered? No organisation or individual would hack into a computer system of such size and complexity - risking discovery and possible prosecution - on the off-chance of finding something interesting or incriminating. The time and effort involved would be enormous and would make finding the needle in the proverbial haystack look like a game of hunt the slipper.

So, whoever discovered and released the e-mails must have known beforehand that they were there.

Ergo, they were not hacked by an outsider but, much more likely, leaked by an insider.

Now, if we work from that basic assumption, what possible motive would an insider have to leak them? It couldn't have been for money, because the corespondence ended up on a public website where it was accessible to anyone free of charge. So, personal gain is eliminated.

That leaves revenge - someone sacked or slighted perhaps? - or conscience. What if the leaker is a former team member disillusioned by the short-cuts, omissions and bullying that the e-mails expose? Such a person would know precisely which mails to copy and publish to reveal what was going on. That person would also, presumably, have to be quite central to the project to be privvy to such correspondence. He or she might, logically, have been one of the people proposing divergent theories whose work was suppressed or dismissed.

The other problem with the hacker theory is timing. As Dr. Pachuri implied in his speech, the principal aim of the hackers was, apparently, to discredit or disrupt the Conference. That was why the e-mails surfaced when they did.

Unfortunately, that theory doesn't hold water either, for the simple reason that the e-mails haven't only just been revealed to the world. In fact, they have been in the public domain for quite some time. Last week, a BBC editor revealed that he had been sent the information several months ago. However, since his instincts were, shall we say, more in tune with Global Warming than journalism, he chose to ingore them; presumably in the hope that they would go away.

Of course they didn't. They have erupted like a large and pustulent boil on the face of the Global Warmers. Rather than try to bust the boil and drain the pus, they have chosen simply to ignore its existence. Their preferrered approach has been to belittle and label anyone who has read the correspondence and arrived at their own opinions as a Flat Earther.

The day they start to think more objectively and agree that there could be other, natural explanations for global warming, I will probably fall off the edge of the world in surprise.