In his efforts to attack the "green gang", the Environment Minister, Sammy Wilson, puts himself at odds with the global scientific community and paints an inaccurate and misleading picture of the scientific evidence.

While he accepts that climate change is occurring, the Minister implies that the recent rise in global average temperature is part of a natural cycle and may be attributable to changes in solar activity. That is not what the scientific community has concluded.

We know that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide and methane, trap heat and make the Earth more than 30 centigrade degrees warmer than it would otherwise be. We also know that man-made emissions have increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases to much higher levels today than have occurred on Earth for at least 650,000 years.

The Minister appears to regard the rise in global average temperature that has accompanied the increase in greenhouse gas levels as merely a coincidence. But the world's scientists do not.

The scientific evidence has been critically reviewed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), set up in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organisation and the United Nations Environment Programme, and today recognised as the world's leading authority on the causes and consequences of climate change.

In its last assessment, published last year, the IPCC concluded: "Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations." It indicated that "very likely" meant a probability of more than 90 per cent.

The IPCC pointed out that the major natural factors influencing the global climate, namely solar and volcanic activity, would have caused a cooling of the Earth in recent decades, rather than the warming we have seen due to the rise in greenhouse gas levels.

It is bizarre that the Minister has missed, or ignored, the findings of the IPCC, and the work of the global scientific community that it draws upon. The IPCC's assessment has been accepted by the member governments of more than 180 nations, including the United Kingdom, and has been endorsed by all of the world's leading scientific and meteorological bodies, such as the Met Office.

The IPCC also assessed a wide range of scenarios for future climate change and concluded that global average temperature could increase by a further 1.1 to 6.4 centigrade degrees by the last decade of the 21st century. This would be accompanied by a significant rise in global sea levels and a variety of regional weather effects, such as increases in the numbers and strengths of heatwaves, storms and other extreme events.

The IPCC also pointed out that human societies will need to adapt to climate change impacts over the coming decades, even if we are successful in reducing emissions to stabilise greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere. But it also warned that adaptation will be much more difficult if we allow emissions to carry on rising, as the Minister appears to want.

There are, of course, uncertainties in our knowledge of climate change, not least because we cannot predict if we will successfully reduce emissions. But the Environment Minister should be basing his view of policy options on the best available scientific evidence, rather than on a desire to appear tough against environmentalists. Clearly, he is not doing that at the moment. He urgently needs to get himself some better scientific advisers, or else he should stand aside and let somebody else, with a better grasp of the science, take on his important job.

Bob Ward is Director of Public Policy at Risk Management Solutions and formerly Senior Manager for Policy Communication at the Royal Society, the UK national academy of science. The views expressed here are his own.

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