Sam Fisher: How will court decide whether weather warming?

Once, nutters thought the end was nigh, now they don't. Photo / Flickr

Opinion

Are we there yet? Are we there yet? We've all heard it. Mainly on television, but also apparently in cars up and down New Zealand and probably the rest of the English-speaking world.

If more of us had the money to go on holiday, somewhere to stay and children, we could hear it as well.

And, are we there yet? The answer is probably. We've reached that place where the world has turned upside down and things are topsy-turvy. We may also have reached the end of the world as we know it.

This week, the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition took the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa) to court, challenging the institute's temperature measurements.

Courts aren't the best place to test science - for a start, there are no Bunsen burners.

On one side: excited militant men with weird haircuts, perhaps like Peter Dunne's bizarre coiffure or like a monk's tonsure. On the other, concerned liberals with furrowed brows in sensible clothes using long words.

The poor judge will try to confine the evidence to process and won't have Denny Crane or Alan Shaw to make the lawyers' summations interesting.

The trial will probably feel like the United States' creationist versus evolution science cases in the 1930s, without the visual charm of being in black and white and having a muttering jury of ordinary townsfolk. Unless the judge can find a way to throw the whole deal out quickly on a technicality - such as, "this isn't a lab" - it could go for months.

The CSC name is so close to CFC it makes me wonder if there isn't some cognitive dissonance (incongruous beliefs held simultaneously) going on, or maybe they're taking the piss.

I can understand that the CSC wants to believe that man-made climate change isn't happening. I'd like to pretend it wasn't happening as well. However, the scientific evidence continues to mount and, if we piled up all the research, it would reach the top of what's left of our atmosphere.

Yes, we all know there are a few scientists who say it isn't happening but reports from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since 1998 suggest that the CSC will have to take a huge number of science and weather organisations to courts around the world to win their argument.

But mostly it's a fool's bet, like insurance. Insurance is when you bet that something awful is going to happen to you. The insurance company bets against you - it says it won't happen and takes your money. If the insurance company wins, it gets your money.

If you win, and something awful happens to you, you still lose. And while you're trying to celebrate your "win" (assuming it wasn't life cover), the insurance company is telling you why it won't pay.

The climate change debate is similar. Most scientists say we need to stop putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The doubters say: "It's rubbish, keep polluting."

If the doubters are correct, we'll be unable to breathe and, if they're wrong, we'll all die horribly. If we reduce greenhouse gases but it makes little difference to global warming, I'm happy to sit in a room for a month or so while the doubters go "nya nya nya". I'll still be breathing easier.

In past years, the nutters were the ones with signs that said: "The world is ending." Now, the nutters have the signs that say: "The world isn't ending, it's all fine."