You might be part of the tiny percentage of people who believe what petrochemical companies have paid for you to believe, mainly that it is nothing to worry about or part of some crazy world government conspiracy. (If it is, it isn’t a very good one.)

So for UK readers, I just wanted to mention the Big Climate Connection, which hopes, with the help of UK citizens, to pressure our governments into doing something about it.

The Stop Climate Chaos Coalition is calling for people across the UK to connect with others in their communities and lobby their MPs on climate change on 5th-6th November.

With supporters coming together in their communities from more than 100 organisations for the Big Climate Connection, we’ll show MPs that people from all walks of life – from environment to development groups, from unions to local community and health groups – are calling for action on climate change.

You can follow the debate, or even join it, here.

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Nuclear power. It’s low carbon, right, and we’re up against the clock to reduce our emissions. You can’t see the smoke billowing into the sky, so it must be clean. And it’s one of the most efficient forms of energy generation, so the theory goes.

But there’s a little bit that needs to be done before the theory can begin. First you need your uranium ore, which at current capabilities of mining and milling is “uneconomic and uses more energy to recover than it will ultimately produce”.

You have to inefficiently hack it out of the ground – foreign ground, in fact. And that’s all right, because the Western world is used to exploiting foreign lands in this way, so once we’ve ruined some communities we’re good to go. We’ve taken nimbyism to a whole new level. This is the future.

Here are the World’s biggest uranium producers, if you’re interested. Notice that none of them are local, which means you have to ship the ore across half the globe and back to Blighty, also generating an environmental impact. And if you free marketeers are worrying about oil price fluctuations, then once the world converts to nuclear, you better start thinking about leaning so heavily on uranium prices, which is – gosh! – a finite resource, too.

Once all that is over, once we’ve done the high carbon bits, the cultural and environmental destruction, we can preach how marvellous and clean it all is. Apart from when we need to dispose of the waste, but that’s all right – we’ll put it in a hole and let the next few thousand generations of children deal with that. Simples.

Nuclear power: all you’re doing is moving pollution elsewhere.

(So what is the solution to all our energy problems? I hear you cry. Why not read this thorough document for a start, which makes some stunning conclusions based on very conservative predictions.)

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The climate scientists at the centre of a media storm were today cleared of accusations that they fudged their results and silenced critics to bolster the case for man-made global warming.

The damage has already been done.

What’s of interest to me here is not the clearing of data – that’s never in doubt – but that the media has given so much attention to it. It provides ammunition (albeit blank) to people who deny man-made climate change exists.

You know, the people who, purely on a hunch or because they read something in a newspaper, deny the massive increase in global mean temperature is anything to do with our industrial activities, without even considering the scientific facts; moreover, choosing to rely on debunked statements based on discredited, false data. Or even worse, listening to people like this.

Such denial has been going on for over a decade now, a lot of it funded by the private sector. By that, I mean environmentally destructive corporations have sought to pay scientists in order to legitimise their polluting activities.

Industry opponents of a treaty to fight global warming have drafted an ambitious proposal to spend millions of dollars to convince the public that the environmental accord is based on shaky science.

Among their ideas is a campaign to recruit a cadre of scientists who share the industry’s views of climate science and to train them in public relations so they can help convince journalists, politicians and the public that the risk of global warming is too uncertain to justify controls on greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide that trap the sun’s heat near Earth.

An informal group of people working for big oil companies, trade associations and conservative policy research organisations that oppose the treaty have been meeting recently at the Washington office of the American Petroleum Institute to put the plan together.

Here are some more investigations into these companies (such as ExxonMobil):

The website Exxonsecrets.org, using data found in the company’s official documents, lists 124 organisations that have taken money from the company or work closely with those that have. These organisations take a consistent line on climate change: that the science is contradictory, the scientists are split, environmentalists are charlatans, liars or lunatics, and if governments took action to prevent global warming, they would be endangering the global economy for no good reason. The findings these organisations dislike are labelled “junk science”. The findings they welcome are labelled “sound science”.

The upshot is, this bribery influences what we, the public, think about the subject.

There exists a very serious industry that actively seeks to discredit hard, scientific data, that the vast majority of the world’s scientists are in agreement with. That is: yes, climates fluctuate – one only has to examine ice-core sediments – but human activity has artificially warmed the globe, forcing (for example), fragile ecosystems – which communities depend upon for food sources, and ultimately to survive – to teeter on the brink of collapse.

It just so happens that the reality is becoming increasingly obscured. There are some very loud mouthed individuals who are either funded by, or have serious investments in, heavily polluting industries – or at the very least are influenced by such individuals – and these people occupy space in broadsheets where they seek to influence public opinion. They rant, scream, and cry that everyone else is mad, no matter how many times they’re proven wrong.

These opinions reject what 97.5% of publishing climatologists (or around 90% of all publishing scientists) believe to be true.

You should not listen to a word these deniers say. Such oral emissions are a foul pollutant indeed.

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