"We are the victims of an age when men of science are discredited ---- . Our philosophers spend all their time in mixing true with false and are interested in nothing but outward show; such little learning as they have they extend on material ends.”

Is this statement a press release on behalf of all the world’s Academies of science, its bureaus of meteorology; from those geoscientists taking atmospheric and oceanic observations and then collating the data?

It might very well be, but it’s actual attribution is to a mathematician and astronomer who lived and worked between thirty and forty human generations ago.

“What fools these mortals be” is another apposite quote, again from way back. Modern society is more technological - but philosophically unchanged; alas, apparently unchanging.

We have similar philosophers. What else to call people, of education or otherwise, who can compare carbon-dioxide to a fertiliser and say or infer “the more of it the better” - when any farmer knows that an excess of nitrogenous (or any other) fertiliser is poisonous to his crop. What sloppy philosophizing to encourage naïve people to believe that “carbon-dioxide has been at much greater concentration in the past, and life thrived”; when those concentrations were associated with, and only compatible with, vastly different life forms from Homo sapiens, and were associated with mass extinctions of non-adaptable species.

Woven into the discussion of taxes on carbon are the men of science, and the philosophers who continue to tax human credibility - as always