A British environmentalist has become the first woman to row alone across the Pacific Ocean, receiving a rock star welcome in Papua New Guinea after finishing a nearly 8,000-mile (13,000-kilometre) journey that nearly claimed her life.

Some South Pacific coral atolls have held their own or even grown in size over the past 60 years despite rising sea levels says new research.

Professor John Abraham's withering scrutiny reveals how the gurus of climate scepticism repeat a pattern of manipulation

• Monckton takes scientist to brink of madness at climate talk

Another one bites the dust. Every so often, someone with a strong stomach and time to spare volunteers to devote weeks or months of their life to a grisly task: investigating the claims of a person who dismisses the science or significance of man-made climate change. Dave Rado did it with Martin Durkin's film, the Great Global Warming Swindle. Howard Friel did it with Bjørn Lomborg. Ian Enting did it with Ian Plimer.

It involves slow, painstaking work, following the sources, checking the claims against the science. But the result in all cases has been the same: a devastating debunking of both the claims and the methods of the people investigated.

Now another fallen idol of climate change denial must be added to the list: Viscount Monckton's assertions have been comprehensively discredited by professor of mechanical engineering John Abraham, at the University of St Thomas in Minnesota.

Abraham, like the other brave souls who have taken on this thankless task, has plainly spent a very long time on it. He investigates a single lecture Monckton delivered in October last year. He was struck by the amazing claims that Monckton made: that climate science is catalogue of lies and conspiracies. If they were true, it would be a matter of the utmost seriousness: human-caused climate change would, as Monckton is fond of saying, be the greatest fraud in scientific history. If they were untrue, it was important to show why.

As Abraham explains at the beginning of his investigation, his scientific credentials didn't mean that he was automatically right, any more than Monckton's lack of scientific credentials meant that he was automatically wrong. Every claim Monckton made would be judged on its merits. Where Monckton gave references, Abraham would follow them up, seeking to discover whether he had accurately represented the papers he cited, or whether the authors of those papers agreed with his interpretation. Where he did not give references, Abraham would see whether Monckton's claims were consistent with published scientific data.

One of the difficulties with tasks like this is that it takes only a minute to make a claim, but can take hours, even days, to investigate it. So if people are making lots of claims, exposing them requires a great deal of work. Judging by the outcome of all the investigations I've mentioned, the gurus of climate change denial appear to expect that no one will have the time and energy to question them.

The results of Abraham's investigation are astonishing: not one of the claims he looks into withstands scrutiny. He exposes a repeated pattern of misinformation, distortion and manipulation, as he explains in the article he has written for the Guardian. Some of Monckton's assertions are breath-taking in their brazen disregard of facts. He has gravely misrepresented papers and authors he refers to, in some cases he appears to have created data, graphs and trends out of thin air: at least that was how it appeared to Abraham when Monckton gave no references and his graphs and figures starkly contradicted the published science.

The lecture, like all those Monckton gives, looked and sounded like science: lots of charts and graphs, plenty of numbers and citations, all delivered with an air of authority and finality. Abraham's hard grind demonstrates that it was a long concatenation of nonsense.

Monckton has already been exposed for falsely claiming that he is a member of the House of Lords (the UK's upper legislative body). Now that his claims about the science have been exposed to such withering scrutiny, it's hard to see how he can bounce back in the eyes of anyone other than his ardent disciples. But among them, I doubt that this exposure will make a jot of difference.

Such is the strength of their belief, that if Monckton were to claim that he is in fact the risen Christ, some of them would still go along with it. Given his past pronouncements, it's probably only a matter of time, so we should soon be able to test this proposition. Even if he somehow managed to alienate his followers, they would simply move on to the next charlatan, as climate change denial groupies have done many times already.

The problem is that people like Lord Monckton, Ian Plimer, Christopher Booker and James Delingpole act as an echo-chamber for each other's discredited beliefs. However nutty their views are, they will be affirmed by other members of the closed circle. Speaking and listening only to each other, as we saw at the Heartland Institute conference last month, their claims become ever weirder and more extreme as they isolate themselves from reality. In circumstances like this, it doesn't matter how comprehensively they are discredited, they will merely dig their holes even deeper.

monbiot.com

• Climate change scepticism
• Climate change
• Climate change

An angry professor who listened to Monckton's speech at a US university demolishes the wild claims made by the climate denier

• George Monbiot: Viscount Monckton, fallen idol of climate denial
• Read John Abraham's reply to Christopher Monckton in full

It takes a lot to make a scientist mad – even today, when it seems that science and scientists are under siege, particularly over the topic of climate change.

But everyone has a breaking point, one straw too many that inspires them to act.

For me, that time came last October when I learned about a British import we have had the displeasure of experiencing here in the United States.

That import, Christopher Monckton, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, had given a rousing speech to a crowd at Bethel University in Minnesota, near where I live.

His speech was on global warming and his style was convincing and irreverent. Anyone listening to him was given the impression that global warming was not happening, or that if it did happen it wouldn't be so bad, and scientists who warned about it were part of a vast conspiracy.

I know a thing or two about global warming. I have worked in the field of heat transfer and fluid mechanics and I have published more than 80 papers on these topics.

I am a university professor and also an active consultant in the energy and environment industry. What I heard in his talk surprised me.

Monckton cited scientist after scientist whose work "disproved" global warming.

He contended that polar bears are not really at risk (in fact they do better as weather warms); projections of sea level rise are a mere 6cm; Arctic ice has not declined in a decade; Greenland is not melting; sea levels are not rising; ocean temperatures are not increasing; medieval times were warmer than today; ocean acidification is not occurring; and global temperatures are not increasing.

If true, these conclusions would be welcome. But there is a problem with this kind of truth – it is not made by wishing.

So I began a journey of investigation (the full results of which you can view here).

I actually tracked down the articles and authors that Monckton cited. What I discovered was incredible, even to a scientist who follows the politics of climate change. I found that he had misrepresented the science.

For instance, Monckton's claims that "Arctic sea ice is fine, steady for a decade" made reference to Alaskan research group (IARC).

I wrote to members of IARC and asked whether this was true. Both their chief scientist and director confirmed that Monckton was mistaken.

They also pointed me to the National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) for a second opinion.

A scientist there confirmed Monckton's error, as did Dr Ola Johannessen, whose work has shown ice loss in Greenland (Monckton reported that Johannessen's work showed that Greenland "was just fine".)

Next, I investigated Monckton's claim that the medieval period was warmer than today. Monckton showed a slide featuring nine researchers' works which, he claimed, proved that today's warming is not unusual – it was hotter in the past.

I wrote to these authors and I read their papers. It turned out that none of the authors or papers made the claims that Monckton attributed to them. This pattern of misinterpretation was becoming chronic.

Next, I checked on Monckton's claim that the ocean has not been heating for 50 years. To quote him directly, there has been "no ocean heat buildup for 50 years".

On this slide, he referenced a well-known researcher named Dr Catia Domingues. It turns out Domingues said no such thing. What would she know? She only works for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia.

In one last, and particularly glaring example, Monckton referred to a 2004 statement by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) which stated that solar activity has caused today's warming and that global warming will end soon.

The president of the IAU division on the sun and heliosphere told me that there is no such position of the IAU and that I should pass this information on to whomever "might have used the IAU name to claim otherwise".

After learning all of this, and much more than can be written about in this limited space, I felt like Alice who fell down the rabbit hole and emerged in an alternate reality.

How can such misrepresentations be made without public recourse? I cannot answer that. I can say that scientists are listening and though our voices are small, we will use them to hold people like Monckton and others to account for their public claims.

The science community is slowly learning that if we don't perform this service, no one will.

Tough decisions are going to have to be made and the public deserves accurate information about the science so they can help make those decisions.

• John Abraham is associate professor in the School of Engineering at the University of St Thomas in Minnesota

• Climate change
• Climate change
• Climate change scepticism

Figures from US scientists show Arctic sea ice is at a record low, while land temperatures are likely to hit new highs

• Nasa scientist James Hansen condemns 'politicised' media

New data from some of the world's leading climate researchers and institutions suggest that 2010 is shaping up to be one of the warmest years ever recorded.

Scientists at the US National Snow and Ice Centre Data Centre (NSIDC) report today that Arctic sea ice – frozen seawater that floats on the ocean surface – is now at its lowest physical extent ever recorded for the time of year, suggesting that it is on course to break the previous record low set in 2007.

Satellite monitoring by the NSIDC in Boulder, Colorado, shows that the melting of sea ice has been unusually fast this year, with as much as 40,000 sq km now disappearing daily.

The melt season started almost a month later than normal at the end of March and is not expected to end until September.

Meanwhile, research from the polar science centre at the University of Washington suggests that the volume of sea ice in March 2010 was 20,300 cubic km, 38% below the 1979 level when records began.

Global surface temperatures may also be at a record high, according to leading climate scientist James Hansen and colleagues at the National Aeronautic Space Administration (Nasa).

In a paper which is yet to be peer-reviewed but has been submitted to the journal Reviews of Geophysics, they suggest that the Earth has been 0.65C warmer over the past 12 months than during the 1951 to 1980 mean, and that the global temperature for 2010 will exceed the 2005 record.

Hansen, credited with being one of the first scientists to study climate change, dismisses sceptics' claims that global warming "stopped" in 1998.

"Record high global temperature during the period with instrumental data was reached in 2010," he writes.

"It is likely that the 2010 global surface temperature ... will be a record.

"Global warming on decadal timescales is continuing without let-up ... we conclude that there has been no reduction in the global warming trend of 0.15-0.2C/decade that began in the late 1970s."

The Nasa research backs up findings by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), the US national climate monitoring service that measures global temperatures by satellite. This has recorded the hottest ever first four months of a year.

As a result of high sea surface temperatures, the Atlantic hurricane season – which officially started this week – is expected to be one of the most intense in years.

Last week NOAA predicted 14 to 23 named storms, including eight to 14 hurricanes – three to seven of which were likely to be "major", with winds of at least 111mph.

This is compared to an average six-month season of 11 named storms, six of which become hurricanes, two of them major.

• Climate change
• Polar regions
• Oceans
• Climate change
• Nasa
• James Hansen
• Arctic
• Natural disasters and extreme weather
• Meteorology

Climatologist also calls from more openness from researchers because data are 'too useful' to be kept 'under wraps'

• UK government chief scientist hits out at sceptics

The utterances of James Hansen, the Nasa climatologist who is widely credited with being the first scientist to successfully megaphone the risks of climate change to the wider world back in the 1980s, always attract attention.

He is nothing less than a Marmite figure within the climate debate; sceptics hate him for his sometimes emotive political advocacy, whereas advocates for action on climate change respect his scientific authority and the role he has played in spelling out to our political masters the potential dangers of climate change.

So a new draft paper (pdf), co-authored with colleagues at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, which has just been submitted to the journal Reviews of Geophysics, is sure to get noticed. Particularly so because it tackles head on the unique pressures facing climate science at the moment, namely, calls from a doubting public and media for climatologists to be more transparent about how they arrive at their conclusions.

For anyone interested in how climatologists collate and interpret the all-important average global temperature datasets the paper (which is yet to be peer reviewed) is an illuminating read, but perhaps the most interesting section for a wider audience – which Hansen admits "might not survive depending on the advice of the [journal's] editors" – is the final concluding section (pdf):

Human-made climate change has become an issue of surpassing importance to humanity, and global warming is the first order manifestation of increasing greenhouse gases that are predicted to drive climate change. Thus it is understandable that analyses of ongoing global temperature change are now subject to increasing scrutiny and criticisms that are different than would occur for a purely scientific problem.
Our comments here about communication of this climate change science to the public are our opinion. Other people may have quite different opinions. We offer our opinion because it seems inappropriate to ignore the vast range of claims appearing in the media and in hopes that open discussion of these matters may help people distinguish the reality of global change sooner than would otherwise be the case. However these comments, even though based on experience over a few decades, are only opinion. Our primary contribution is quantitative results discussed in the numbered paragraphs below. [Leo: certainly worth reading, but too long to include here on this blog.]
Communication of the status of global warming to the public has always been hampered by weather variability. Lay people's perception tends to be strongly influenced by the latest local fluctuation. This difficulty can be alleviated by stressing the need to focus on the frequency and magnitude of warm and cold anomalies, which change noticeably on decadal time scales as global warming increases.
A greater obstacle to public communication has arisen with the politicization of reporting of global warming, a perhaps inevitable consequence of the economic and social implications of efforts required to alter the course of human-made climate change. We have the impression that the effect of politicization on communication of the science is aggravated by the fact that much of the media is owned by or strongly influenced by special economic interests.
The task of alleviating the communication obstacle posed by politicization is formidable. The difficulty is compounded by continual attacks on the credibility of scientists. Polls indicate that the attacks have been effective in causing many members of the public to doubt the reality of global warming.
Given this situation, the best hope may be repeated clear description of the science and passage of sufficient time to confirm validity of the description. A problem with that prescription is the danger that the climate system could pass tipping points that cause major climate changes to proceed largely out of humanity's control [Hansen et al., 2008]. Yet continuation of this approach seems to be essential for the sake of minimizing the degree of inevitable climate change, even while other ways are sought to draw attention to the dangers of continued greenhouse gas increases.
One lesson we have learned is that making our global data analysis immediately available, with data use by ourselves and others helping to reveal flaws in the input data, has a practical disadvantage: it allows any data flaws to be interpreted and misrepresented as machinations. Yet the data are too useful for scientific studies to be kept under wraps, so we will continue to make the data available on a monthly basis. But we are making special efforts to make the process as transparent as possible, including availability of the computer program that does the analysis, the data that goes into the analysis (also available from original sources), and detailed definition of urban adjustment of meteorological station data.

There is, of course, plenty of urgent discussion going on at the moment about how to better communicate the climate change message following the events of recent months, such as the hacked/stolen/leaked/[for the purposes of avoiding a tedious debate, insert your own term] UEA emails, which have caused public confidence in climate science to nose dive. For example, Bob Ward was writing about just this issue in New Scientist last week.

But it is still interesting to hear the thoughts of one of climate science's leading voices, particularly one who has never shied away from implicitly politicising the communication of the science via his often strident advocacy of certain solutions.

Hansen lays out the efforts he has made to be transparent and open with his data. Advocating this approach despite the danger that flaws could be "interpreted and misrepresented as machinations" could be taken as an implicit criticism of the climate scientists at the University of East Anglia. They have come under attack for discussions in the stolen emails that were published in November which suggested they were withholding information from their critics.

Does this mean that Hansen will now temper his campaigning role and solely stick to "doing the science" though? After all, the paper also states that "our principal task remains the scientific one; trying to describe with increasing clarity and insight the global temperature change that is occurring".

One thing that Hansen and other climatologists will be desperately trying to communicate - as he does in this paper – is that 2010 is currently on course to challenge for the title of the hottest year on record, despite popular perception to the contrary following a cold winter in much of the northern hemisphere. As the paper states:

The 12-month running mean global temperature in the GISS analysis has reached a new record in 2010. The new record temperature in 2010 is particularly meaningful because it occurs when the recent minimum of solar irradiance is having its maximum cooling effect. At the time of this writing (May 2010) the tropical Pacific Ocean has changed from El Nino conditions to ENSO-neutral and is likely headed into the cool La Nina phase of the Southern Oscillation. The 12-month running mean global temperature may continue to rise for a few more months before the ENSO change causes the next decline. It is likely that global temperature for calendar year 2010 will exceed the 2005 record, but that is not certain if a deep La Nina develops quickly.

As Hansen acknowledges, the race is now on to present news such as this in a dispassionate, transparent, authoritative manner to a public that is also at the same time being aggressively courted by a noisy, anarchic blogosphere and a politicised media who are repeatedly urging them to shoot the messenger.

Yes, to a certain degree the messengers have conspired to shoot themselves in the foot of late, but what Hansen and his colleagues are now urgently trying to do is reboot the climate debate and start afresh. The message seems to be: if it means going back to basics and starting from the beginning all over again, then so be it.

• Climate change
• Climate change
• James Hansen

Meteorologists record a temperature of 53.7C (129F) in Mohenjo-daro as heatwave continues across Pakistan and India

Mohenjo-daro, a ruined city in what is now Pakistan that contains the last traces of a 4,000-year-old civilisation that flourished on the banks of the river Indus, today entered the modern history books after government meteorologists recorded a temperature of 53.7C (129F). Only Al 'Aziziyah, in Libya (57.8C in 1922), Death valley in California (56.7 in 1913) and Tirat Zvi in Israel (53.9 in 1942) are thought to have been hotter.

Temperatures in the nearest town, Larkana, have been only slightly lower in the last week, with 53C recorded last Wednesday. As the temperatures peaked, four people died, including a prisoner serving a life sentence for murder and an elderly woman. Dozens are said to have fainted.

The extreme heat was exacerbated by chronic power cuts which have prevented people from using air-conditioning. The electricity has cut out for eight hours each day as part of a severe load-shedding regime that has caused riots in other parts of Pakistan where cities are experiencing a severe heatwave with temperatures of between 43C and 47C.

"It's very tough," said M B Kalhoro, a local correspondent for Dawn.com, an online newspaper. "When the power is out, people just stay indoors all the time."

The blistering heat now engulfing Pakistan stretches to India where more than 1,000 people have reportedly died of heatstroke or heart attacks in the last two months. Although Europe and China have experienced cooler than average winters, record or well-above average temperatures have been recorded in Tibet and Burma this year.

Southern Europe was yesterday rapidly warming after a particularly cool winter. Thirteen provinces in southern Spain, including Andalucia, Murcia and the Canary islands, were put on "yellow alert" after meteorologists forecast temperatures rising to 38C (99F) in Cadiz, Córdoba, Jaén, Malaga and Seville.

According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), the national climate monitoring service that measures global temperatures by satellite, 2010 is shaping up to be one of the hottest years on record. The first four months were the hottest ever measured, with record spring temperatures in northern Africa, south Asia and Canada.

The global temperature for March was a record 13.5C (56.3F) and average ocean temperatures were also the hottest for any March since record-keeping began in 1880.

As a result of high sea surface temperatures, the Atlantic hurricane season, which officially started today is now expected to be one of the most intense in years. Last week NOAA predicted 14 to 23 named storms, including eight to 14 hurricanes, three to seven of which were likely to be "major" storms, with winds of at least 111mph. This is compared to an average six-month season of 11 named storms, six of which become hurricanes, two of them major.

On Sunday, scientists reported that Africa's Lake Tanganyika, the second deepest freshwater lake in the world, is now at its warmest in 1,500 years, threatening the fishing industry on which several million lives depend. The lake's surface waters, at 26C (78.8F), have reached temperatures that are "unprecedented since AD500," they reported in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Some scientists have suggested that the warming experienced around the world this year is strongly linked to warmer than usual currents in the Pacific Ocean, a regular phenomenon known as El Niño. Others say that it is consistent with long-term climate change.

• Natural disasters and extreme weather
• Pakistan
• Meteorology
• Climate change
• Climate change

Global warming has always energised Hay audiences – but this year the mood is much more sober

For the past four or five years, one theme burned through discussions at Hay more than most: climate change, and the large and small things human beings might do to tackle it. Politicians – including, most famously, Al Gore – arrived here to talk up their ecological credentials, green authors warned the crowds of the doom that may await us, and everyone lapped it up.

Moreover, with the Copenhagen summit coming into view, last year's environmental sessions had an infectious mixture of trepidation and momentum, as they focused on The Big Question: whether the governments of the world would congregate and resolve to actually do something.

And then look what happened. Copenhagen turned out to be a grim, acrimonious affair, and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change process now looks dangerously close to stalling. Just before the summit took place, the so-called "Climategate" affair (when emails at the University Of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit were hacked, leading to a flurry of accusations about data manipulation) allowed the sceptics a field day. Immediately afterwards, a dispute about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's work on melting Himalayan glaciers gave them even more encouragement. Recession and the crisis in public finances, too, seemed to hoof climate change well down the world's list of political priorities – while even this year's bitter winter gave the voices of climate-change denial yet another boost.

As a result, this year's green Hay sessions have an ever-so-slightly tortured kind of atmosphere, translatable as "What are we going to do now?", and are largely devoid of the spurts of tentative optimism that preceded Copenhagen.

On Saturday afternoon, the former Energy and Climate Change Secretary – and much-tipped Labour leadership contender – Ed Miliband delivers one of this year's big eco-hits: a video-link conversation with the president of the Maldives, the cluster of islands in the Pacific Ocean that's already dealing with the grim effects of an overheating planet. Mohamed Nasheed, 43, came to office after long years of torture and imprisonment; now he's keen to talk about rising sea and freshly-evacuated islands, and tell people in the Northern Hemisphere what's required of them. "What we need is large-scale, 60s-style direct action: dynamic street activity," he says. "We need to act very quickly." The words rouse the crowd, but there's an uneasiness in the air: right now, are large amounts of "dynamic street activity" a realistic possibility?

An hour after the event, I meet Miliband. "When I was here last year," he says, "I did an event with Franny Armstrong [director of the climate change film The Age Of Stupid]. There was high expectation then. Now, there's a sense of" – he slows down, so as to pick his words carefully – "sober reality. But I don't think there's a despair. People don't think it's all hopeless. Copenhagen was the crest of a wave, and you inevitably have a bit of a sense of disappointment, and people wanting to gear themselves up again. I think they realise you've got to dig in for a long struggle. That's what it felt like today: people were talking about education, and how we get lots of different people involved – they were taking a long view."

One all-important question, though: how will people like him once again put jump-leads on the public mood?

"It's a struggle," Miliband admits. "Look: President Nasheed didn't despair. From 1991 to 2008, he was jailed on 13 separate occasions. And as he told us today, he didn't say, 'Oh, I'm giving up now.' You've got to always realise that there is a sense of possibility, and that you do have setbacks on the road. But just because it isn't easy, doesn't mean you give up."

The day's next green talkfest is a conversation between Rosie Boycott and Nicholas Stern, the economist and life peer who authored 2006's Stern Review, which made the case for cutting our emissions on the basis of hard-headed logic: to do so now would take a tiny fraction of the world's cash and resources, whereas sitting back and then trying to cope with a boiling planet would almost literally cost the Earth. His specialism is a forensic, inevitably rather wonk-ish take on what to do next – underpinned by an optimism that defines just about all his answers.

When I suggest that the recession seems to have turned people – and, more importantly, countries – inwards, and squashed the kind of collective thinking we're surely going to need if our emissions levels are even to start coming down, he claims that an economic downturn is the ideal time to push economies in a greener direction.

"This is a special opportunity," Stern says. "If you've got idle resources, the right thing to do is to invest in the growth story of the future – not just reflate the economy in a business-as-usual way. The Koreans' reflation package was about 70% into green activities. With China, it was 25 or 30%. This was an argument that went round the world, and in a few cases, people acted on it."

So why has climate change apparently disappeared from the political agenda? Again, more glass-half-full stuff: "It wasn't ever prominent in the election campaign. But one of the reasons for that was that the parties are actually in quite close agreement. It was all there in their manifestos. When David Cameron was putting the coalition together, he said, 'Let's start with what we agree on.' And this was point number two."

Stern is surely sounding too optimistic for his own good, not least when he chews over Copenhagen's deadening aftermath. "Life is full of ups and downs. People didn't see, because it was so chaotic and acrimonious, that the Copenhagen accord turned out to be a strong platform for going forward. It was much less fragile than many of us feared. The submissions to Copenhagen now cover 120 countries, and 80% of emissions. If everybody delivers, it will give you emissions levels in 2020 that are the same as we have now. And we'll have peaked. That's really worth having."

By way of an antidote, I pitch up at an admirably eco-minded hotel in nearby Kington, to meet 91-year-old Professor James Lovelock, on his third trip to the festival. He cuts a fascinating figure here: thanks to the brilliant Gaia Hypothesis (whereby the Earth is seen as a self-regulating system, akin to a living organism), he was one of the first intellectuals to embrace what we now know as green thinking, yet he calmly makes the kind of arguments that send many environmentalists over the edge. At his afternoon event, all is ambivalence: he's received as a hero, but then spends a good deal of his allotted hour taking questions – and mini-speeches – from irate members of the audience.

To boil down any of Lovelock's thoughts to a few sentences is to do him a serious disservice, but here goes. As he sees it, climate change is now all but out of control. We should certainly cut our greenhouse-gas emissions, but focus most of our efforts on adapting to a world that, sooner or later, will turn troublesome beyond words. As part of that, he has long claimed the only sustainable method of generating the electricity Britain needs is nuclear power – and that in large swathes of the world, solar and wind power are already proving to be a dangerous distraction. From time to time, he dispenses optimism, of a sort: he's not having the standard-issue predictions of steadily-rising global temperatures, and thinks that though the Earth could suddenly heat up in a way that few models have so far predicted, we might also have longer to prepare than some people think.

"Who knows? Everybody might be wrong," he says. "I may be wrong. Climate change may not happen as fast as we thought, and we may have 1,000 years to sort it out."

If that sounds comforting, bear in mind that the subtitle of his latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, is "the final warning" – and when it comes to the kind of climate change-related schemes that dominate the headlines, he tends to sound withering, to say the least. Copenhagen, he tells me, was not just "futile" but "a monumental extravagance – I'm never convinced that big people-gatherings like that can solve the truly important issues." His most dismissive words, however, are reserved for the Stern Review: "If you mix up some science that's incomplete with some economics which is almost as bad, you're going to get an absolutely dreadful progeny."

In the context of Hay, Lovelock's most sobering point takes on a grim hilarity. The argument is simple enough: even if the public were to get newly excited, and politicians were united by fresh resolve, the human race might face an insurmountable problem – that even the kind of great minds who come to Hay might not have the IQ required for such a massive challenge.

"The main problem is that we're not really clever enough as a species," he says, with a wry look. "We haven't developed far enough. The Earth's evolving, and we're evolving with it – but it's a damn slow process. It's taken us a million years to change from being semi-intelligent animals to what we are now: still animals, and still semi-intelligent. I don't think we can handle big problems like the Earth."

• Guardian Hay festival
• Climate change
• Climate change
• Climate change scepticism
• Global climate talks
• Ed Miliband
• James Lovelock

The year is 2100. Londoners and their guests need a pastiche of Arcadia in the heart of the capital. Peak summer daily temperatures are nearly seven degrees hotter than they were in 2000, and the city is far more crowded. By mid-afternoon the day's heat is starting to hang heavy, and will not disperse until the small hours. Evenings are febrile and nights fitful. Shaded open spaces draw people out of doors like a magnet summoning iron filings.

Just as leading US experts give their clearest warning about emissions, 43 UK scientists prompt Royal Society to rethink

• Government's chief scientific adviser hits out at climate sceptics

Two weeks ago, the United States National Academy of Sciences published its clearest ever report on the science of climate change. It concluded: "Climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems."

Over recent years, particularly during the George W Bush administration, the academy has faced great challenges in presenting the science of climate change to domestic policymakers, many of whom have been in denial about the consequences of greenhouse gas emissions.

But with Barack Obama in the White House, the academy has been more able to offer scientific advice that some politicians may find inconvenient.

So it is ironic that just as the leading scientists in the US give their clearest warning about climate change, we now see suggestions that some fellows of UK's national academy of science, the Royal Society, might be disputing the evidence.

Last December, ahead of the United Nations conference in Copenhagen, the society published a statement entitled Preventing dangerous climate change, which was unequivocal.

It said: "It is certain that GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and from land use change lead to a warming of climate, and it is very likely that these GHGs are the dominant cause of the global warming that has been taking place over the last 50 years."

But now, 43 of the society's 1,489 fellows have written to complain about some of its statements about climate change published over the last few years. It is not clear exactly what the 43 have concerns about.

And because their identities have not been made public, we do not know whether any of them are climate researchers.

There are certainly some fellows working outside climate science who dispute the findings of mainstream researchers.

One such is Anthony Kelly, a member of the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a lobby group set up by Nigel Lawson last year to promote scepticism about climate change.

Professor Kelly is an 81-year-old distinguished research fellow in materials science and metallurgy at Cambridge University.

The other members of the GWPF's academic advisory council include Ian Plimer, the Australian geologist who has wrongly claimed that volcanoes produce more carbon dioxide than human activities.

The news that 43 fellows apparently disagree with the society is likely to generate even further public confusion about the causes and consequences of climate change.

A YouGov poll published earlier this week found that 40% of the public either do not believe climate change is happening, or think scientists are divided about its occurrence, compared with 32% last year.

The Royal Society is carrying out a review of its statements on climate change in response to the fellows' letter. It will no doubt prefer to remain silent until the review is completed.

But given the impact of the controversies over the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it would be better if the 43 fellows made their concerns public, and the society clarified where it stands on the scientific evidence about climate change.

• Bob Ward is policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and was head of media relations at the Royal Society until September 2006.

• Climate change
• Climate change scepticism
• Copenhagen climate change conference 2009
• Climate change
• Barack Obama
• George Bush
• US politics
• United Nations
• University of Cambridge
• University of East Anglia
• London School of Economics and Political Science

Professor John Beddington dismisses 'unreasonable' comments from groups including Nigel Lawson's thinktank, as Royal Society responds to critics with new climate science guide

• UK Royal Society revives confusion as US concludes climate change certainty

The government's chief scientific adviser has hit out at climate sceptics who attack global warming science on spurious grounds.

The statements from Professor John Beddington appeared to be a veiled attack on the former Tory chancellor and arch climate sceptic Nigel Lawson.

Beddington said that he had met Lord Lawson to brief him about the science of global warming.

His comments came as the Royal Society announced that it would publish a new guide to climate science for the public following criticism of existing statements on the topic, reportedly from 43 of the society's 1,489 fellows.

"It has been suggested that the society holds the view that anyone challenging the consensus on climate change is malicious – this is ridiculous," said Professor Martin Rees, the society's president.

"Science is organised scepticism and the consensus must shift in light of the evidence.

"In the current environment we believe this new guide will be very timely. Lots of people are asking questions, indeed even within the fellowship of the society there are differing views."

In his first interview since the election, Beddington agreed that true scientific scepticism was healthy and must be encouraged but he criticised individuals and organisations that cherrypicked data for political ends.

"There is no doubt that there are organisations and individuals who will choose to characterise the science as being nonsensical on the basis of what are not reasonable criticisms," he said.

He highlighted the spurious argument that because the UK winter had been so cold, climate change science must be wrong.

Beddington said there was a difference between weather and climate. "The fact that we have had a very cold winter in Britain does not mean that the climate is not getting warmer," he said, adding that rejecting global warming on those grounds was wrong. "This is just not science. This is commentary," he said.

Lawson's thinktank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, has deployed similar arguments to downplay the significance of climate change.

Benny Peiser, a social anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University who is the foundation's director, said in December last year: "We look out of the window and it's very cold, it doesn't seem to be warming."

Lawson has said that "global warming ... is not at the present time happening". Peiser has previously said the GWPF does not challenge climate science but concentrates on examining policy implications.

Beddington, who gave a public lecture on climate change at the University of York yesterday, was also highly critical of the mistakes made by the UN's climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which he called "fundamentally stupid statements".

Referring to the incorrect claim that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035, he said: "Nobody in their right mind would see that as even a scientific statement. There's no uncertainty, there's no caveats." But he added that overall the IPCC report had a "remarkably small number of problems".

Beddington said that he had yet to have a formal meeting with David Cameron or Nick Clegg, but he said the coalition government faced a slew of scientific and engineering issues.

"Just about anywhere I look around the portfolio of government problems in any department, there are big issues of science and engineering including social science," he said.

He highlighted climate change, obesity, the volcanic ash cloud and vigilance to pandemic influenza as pressing problems for government to address.

He said he would advise Cameron to shield funding for scientific research from future spending cuts as far as possible.

"If you then think about how the UK as an economy is going to compete in the future, the underpinning of science and engineering having the best quality students, the best quality scientists and engineers is absolutely imperative."

When asked about the BP oil spill off the coast of Louisiana, Beddington said there would be lessons for the UK.

"I think we need to understand it," he said. "I think deep offshore [drilling] presents formidable engineering problems as you can see from the attempt to actually deal with it.

"I think that one will have to be asking questions about the appropriate levels of regulation that are operating in licensing deep offshore drilling in the North Sea."

• Climate change
• Climate change scepticism
• Deepwater Horizon oil spill
• Oil spills
• Glaciers
• Climate change
• Martin Rees
• Liberal-Conservative coalition
• David Cameron
• Nick Clegg