Paul Hudson is the "Climate Correspondent" for the BBC. The fact that such a job exists is evidence of the BBC's commitment to the climate change orthodoxy. You would think that his job would be to explain how the news, no matter what it is, confirms the theory. But that is not what he did. Perhaps he thinks his job is to accurately report the news of climate change. I will be more than mildly surprised if he is right about that. Here is what he says:

For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures. And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise. So what on Earth is going on?

So let's consider this. There has been no increase of global temperatures over the last eleven years. That's curious because anyone who follows the climate news knows that all sorts of disasters are happening right now (glaciers receding, etc.) because of global warming. But how can this be if global warming isn't exactly happening, right now?

We also note that the climate models on which the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis are based aren't accurate, over the last ten years. Man-made carbon emissions have sure enough been increasing, but clearly that has not produced warmer climates. What on earth is going on?

Hudson tells us this:

Sceptics argue that the warming we observed was down to the energy from the Sun increasing. After all 98% of the Earth's warmth comes from the Sun.

But research conducted two years ago, and published by the Royal Society, seemed to rule out solar influences. The scientists' main approach was simple: to look at solar output and cosmic ray intensity over the last 30-40 years, and compare those trends with the graph for global average surface temperature. And the results were clear. "Warming in the last 20 to 40 years can't have been caused by solar activity," said Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, a leading contributor to this year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

But one solar scientist Piers Corbyn from Weatheraction, a company specialising in long range weather forecasting, disagrees. He claims that solar charged particles impact us far more than is currently accepted, so much so he says that they are almost entirely responsible for what happens to global temperatures. He is so excited by what he has discovered that he plans to tell the international scientific community at a conference in London at the end of the month. If proved correct, this could revolutionize the whole subject.

Well, maybe Corbyn is right. If he is, it would indeed "revolutionize the whole subject," if by "revolutionize" you mean refute the orthodoxy. It's amazing how inconvenient science can be.

It's not just Corbyn or Hudson who have doubts.

To confuse the issue even further, last month Mojib Latif, a member of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) says that we may indeed be in a period of cooling worldwide temperatures that could last another 10-20 years.

Professor Latif is based at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University in Germany and is one of the world's top climate modellers. But he makes it clear that he has not become a sceptic; he believes that this cooling will be temporary, before the overwhelming force of man-made global warming reasserts itself.

The theory of anthropogenic global warming has not been refuted at all. We should take it seriously, and be working on plans to deal with it if indeed it reemerges as a problem. But it's not a problem right now and we can't be sure how much of a problem, if any, it will be in the future.

Only relatively wealthy nations can afford to care about the environment. Or to put it more directly, only such nations will in fact care and act about it. If we act so as to hobble our economies on the basis of slim evidence, we run the risk of discrediting science and provoking an anti-scientific backlash. If you really want to promote responsible environmental policies, you have to make sure that economic growth is restored.