We are on a course in the face of the challenge of climate change that a professor says is ''political madness'' but which might more accurately be described as ''madness'' without the characterisation, and for which whether climate change exists or not, there is one logical solution, the adoption of nuclear power, a proposal being put forward by a union leader.
The professor is Don Aitkin, who was vice-chancellor of Canberra University. The trade union leader is Paul Howes, national secretary of the Australian Workers' Union.
Nobody can sensibly argue that in order to meet the needs of a modern nation, nuclear power is the only alternative to the burning of fossil fuel.
Wind power, solar power, tidal power, biofuels (that is to say, burning food) all work at the margins. They don't run steel mills, railways and city lights. Howes has been howled down by the union movement and the Australian Labor Party, although he is right.
Aitkin said he was not on his own, but he conceded that those in the scientific community, and political advisers and business leaders, were afraid to speak out.
A few years ago, scientists were united in their view that what we were witnessing was an example of the enormous variability in weather patterns. Now they were just as united in asserting that there was such a thing as climate change, and woe to the world unless we took action now. Aitkin said this dated back about 20 years to when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was set up to represent national meteorology bureaus and the United Nations Environmental Program.
Aitkin said the issue was whether we were simply entering a new warming period, of which there had been a number, or whether we were creating new man-made climate Anthropogenic Global Warming or a bit of both.
But the rate of increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide at a mere one to two parts per million a year was not scary. There were two periods of warming in the last century, from 1910 to 1945 and from 1975 to 1998, and no evidence of it since then. In the past year the world had cooled by more than the whole of the warming during the 20th century. The Arctic ice could be melting, but Antarctica appeared to be cooling.
''I can't see strong evidence that we [human beings] are the principal source of warming,'' Aitkin told a regional meeting of the NSW Farmers Association. ''I am an agnostic about there being an imminent catastrophe, and about the need for swingeing economic policies.''
Some of the senior people in and around the IPCC were scientist-activists, with a quasi-religious view that unless the world woke up to itself, we would not have a future. Environmentalism had elements of a quasi-religious movement, with Gaia, the spirit of the Earth, as the goddess. ''The religious are rarely interested in argument or evidence.''
Furthermore, thousands of people now depended on the Anthropogenic Global Warming proposition. Money flowed to institutes and universities because of it. ''National scientific academies are now in the happy position of being powerful, and they have become political in an apparent attempt to protect that pleasant power, whatever its impact on science.''
The Anthropogenic Global Warming proposition fitted the world view of the Greens and the environmentalists. Governments dependent on Green support were trapped into Green policies, as was plainly the Rudd Government.
''The hard heads may not buy the story, but they do want to be elected or re-elected.''
Humans liked horror stories, and governments did not like uncertainty. They searched for the one-handed adviser who plumps for action. People stayed out of the debate because they feared it would be bad for their businesses or their reputations.
So Anthropogenic Global Warming had become orthodoxy. Yet the notion that there was an easy path to a reduced dependence on global warming was quite odd. If we were to price oil and coal to a point where people did not want to use fossil fuel, we would have to change our whole way of life.
Many in the environmental movement wanted that to happen, but governments that introduced such measures needed to be sure they had the electorate on side. Already the rapid increase in the price of fuel (caused by demand outpacing supply) was causing strikes and demonstrations in Europe. ''To artificially induce such perturbations into any society is a form of electoral madness.''
Fuel costs were already putting pressure on the Government to alleviate the misery that Australian families would experience, and that now was not a great time to tell people that they needed to accept more misery for the sake of mankind. The carbon tax for which environmentalists were seeking would reduce incomes and push more industry offshore to China and India. You could call this a return to the Stone Age and ask why the Government thought it necessary.
In Washington, Howes told The Australian that if Australia were to reduce carbon output while wishing to keep heavy industry a new source of energy was needed. That meant nuclear, he said.
Common sense is not all that common in Australia's global warming debate, where too many of those taking part seem unable to distinguish between a power station and an own-goal from a nuclear bomb.
Aitkin and Howes are clearly able to draw on this valuable resource more easily that the Government. So, it would seem, are the voters of Gippsland, who returned a National Party candidate last Saturday with a (two-party preferred) 9 per cent swing against Kevin Rudd, Peter Garrett and Bob Brown.
David Barnett is a Canberra writer.