Mark Lawson's article is intellectual mutton dressed up as lamb--he puts himself forward as an unprejudiced voice of reason in this "debate"--what debate!--but the minimifidianisn shines through. The "debate" is a euphemism for the manipulation of the eagerly-credulous, by sundry naysayers and vested interests, to disbelieve mountains of scientific evidence. AGW perfectly instances why popular democracy is and absolute failure when it comes to issues that transcend domestic smugness.
Certainly a very sly move, Mark, going on about Y2K initially, as if there's any comparison between that and AGW, or the analogy is even reasonable--Y2K turned out to be "alarmism" and so will AGW, he says implicitly.
Sadly, this sort of silly syllogistic reasoning is compelling for those who desperately "want" to be convinced and reassured (many of whom have no trouble believing in divine fairy tales, so no problem), and for the weak-minded fence-sitters who hang on popular opinion as if it ever proved anything but that ignorance rules!
But for those who see ignorant denialism for what it is, hysterical conservatism, the scientific literature and renowned bodies like the Royal Society and the IPCC are going to be much more plausible and compelling. Sadly, the latter are probably the minority, and the democratic majority's always right, even when they vote to keep the collective head in the oven!
It's not the media's fault either; the popular media, like our politicians, is a flawless mirror held up to the masses.

@Curmudgeon: The confusion is there because the subject is confused, and the media simply reflects that.

No, the subject is not confused. It is a pretty simple story:

1. Climate scientists cooked up some models 30 years ago that said the world would warm due to CO2 increases.

2. Their predictions came true. Contrary to your claims, the vast majority of their predictions to date have been correct. For example, see: http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003800/a003817/ It's pretty dammed compelling. The world has gotten warmer and the trend is accelerating.

3. Scientists who study climate full time are, almost to the man, now convinced these models are correct.

4. Despite the recent success of the models, some people still doubt their predictive capacity. This is reasonable, but none of the people doing the objecting have spent much time studying the climate.

It's a pretty simple story really. You, among many, haven't been reporting it.

For example even in this story you refer to climate gate. When I first saw climate gate, my gut reaction as some off colour remarks made in the heat of the moment during a personal conversation conducted via private emails had become public. Once the authors had got their frustrations off their chest, in the cold light of day they perused more sober courses of action. In hindsight, after many inquires all coming to that same conclusion, that gut feeling was right.

I am not a genius Mark. The import, or otherwise of climate gate was plain for everybody to see. So did you, or many of your journalist friends report the facts and their most likely interpretation?

Nope. You beat the incident up within an inch of its life, giving what should have been a footnote in the gossip columns feet of newsprint. Anybody reading those pieces would likely be confused into thining something important had happened. In fact the only noteworthy part of that incident (which was hardly mentioned) is that a University was hacked and private emails released right before Copenhagen.

And now you come along, saying "Hey, don't blame me for all the confusion!". Get real.

Mark Lawson here
rstuart - again you want to refight the climate arguement which is essentialy irrelvent to the article. Your post is a more extreme version of the climate commission report which contained nothing new. Even the link you cite essentially confirms the basic point made by the sceptics that nothing much has happened since 1998. The warmest year claim is arguable but in essence the difference between last year and 1998 is tiny, and temperatures have since fallen. We know perfectly well that we are in the warm part of the climate cycle, but if CO2 is supposed to be so important why no movement? Forecasting systems should be verified properly. There has been no effort at verification of the climate models worthy of the name.

You would do better to acknowledge that there is some doubt and the media is reflecting that doubt. It is not there to reflect the views of activists.

Squeers
The style of ranting in your post is getting old. Stop abusing and start debating. The Y2K incident is simply the most handy example of experts being completely, collectively wrong in their own field. What about recent efforts to forecast the sunspot cycle? In March 2006 NASA put out press releases saying that new computer models forecast that the next solar cycle (I hope you know what a solar cycle is) would be 30 to 50 per cent stronger than the previous one, and up to one year late. In fact the sun's succession of solar cycles promptly broke down entirely. The forecast was totally wrong. Forecasts by experts that are completely wrong are very common.

I'm sorry Mark but the vast majority of true Y2K experts were not wrong they called it almost perfectly - it wasn't a real problem at all. A few experts may have disagreed (clearly the ones you talked to) but they were very much in the minority.

The opposite is true for climate change. The vast majority of experts believe it is a serious problem and a few don't. I believe in going with the vast majority.

Mart N - if you believe that on Y2K you are in a tiny minority, which includes the experts who believed in Y2K at the time. It is often cited as a case where the experts were completely wrong.. in any case its just one example of experts being wrong.

Incidentally - did you see this bit in the original article.. I just looked now and realised a huge piece was missing..
"New Year’s Day dawned with computer systems everywhere working as they had. Even the ancient, clunking PC 286s of the time did not turn a hair. Proponents of the Millenium Bug crisis have since tried to claim that the lack of reaction was due to all the work that had been put into system, but as Canadian journalist Dan Gardner points out in his recent book Future Babble (McClelland & Stewart, 2011), corporations and companies that did nothing about the crisis fared just as well as those which replaced whole systems."

If you want to know about experts failing at forecasting, then Dan Gardner's book is for you. The issue of the use and otherwise of forecasts has also been explored in some depth by those who study fercasting as a subject. Check out the site www.forecastingprinciples.com run by a couple of academics..

Relying on experts in foecasting is a waste of time - what track record does the theory they are using have..

Curmudgeon,
my post wasn't abusive; I choose words for their precision and used the word ignorance to describe the democratic impasse at which we've arrived on climate change.
The science of AGW is no more comparable to Y2K than it is to the science of solar cycles. As you well know, the science of AGW is myriad in its range of data, and vastly complex, especially given our tiny contingent perspective--in medias res--on the geological-time frame of natural climate cycles. Given the myriad influences on climate, including no doubt the ones scientists are not aware of, it would be an extraordinary concerted-effort to say anything unequivocal on the subject. I doubt there's any individual in the world qualified to profess such concerted knowledge And this is exactly what you and the other minimifidianists thrive on--equivocation.
AGW exemplifies the limitations of specialisation and empiricism in general; they are unequal to the task of conceiving of the problem holistically. This is the province of human reason uninhibited by missing data, able to proceed without all the pieces, based on a composite idea of the salient influences. Of course empirical science is seen as the least fallible way to process experience, but in this case it lends itself to endless equivocation.
But AGW is only part of the anthropogenic devastation of the planet, we may infer its likelihood from the fact that we are simultaneous degrading oceans, soils, fauna and flora. There is no question but that humanity has become a formidable geological force, we don't need every piece of the jigsaw in place before we can plainly see the finished picture.
The reason I denounce minimifidianism as "hysterical conservatism", is because its cohort are the "alarmists"--alarmed at any notion that their smug world-view might be subject to criticism, or, heaven forbid, that they might have to embrace change.
Minifidianists are the most profoundly ignorant of all; they have neither science nor reason.