The world, at some of the highest levels of leadership, is gathered in cold Copenhagen to put an end to global warming and the climate change it is supposed to be causing.

Meanwhile, Jamaica is facing the hottest December the temperature sensors of my skin have ever registered. And I have been around for a while. We are faced with water lock-offs more extensive than anything in a bad, hot and dry summer. The Minister of Water and Housing, Dr Horace Chang, thrust before media cameras and microphones for last week's post-Cabinet press briefing, has proudly announced that Government will be spending $477 million on a five-pronged drought-mitigation programme to ease the protracted water shortage by February next year.

A storage-tank programme is also to come on stream to ensure that households acquire adequate storage facilities to receive trucked water. Water trucks will not, of course, be able to reach many of the squatter-settlement households whose existence is another headache problem under Dr Chang's portfolio.

Our water problem is no consequence of a fairly mild end-of-year drought. It is a consequence of negligence and short-sightedness. Jamaica receives enough precipitation, on average, and has enough surface and ground water to meet domestic and industrial needs, far in excess of current demand. It is storage and harnessing which is the problem. No new reservoir has been built since the end of colonial rule and the gift of 'Independence'.

'little Mauritius'

Minister of Water and Housing Dr Horace Chang.

I have to take you back to little Mauritius, only 720 square miles big. The map of the country is dotted with blue patches, blue for water. At first take, I wondered how this island had so many lakes. They are not lakes, they are reservoirs. The one we toured, with a daughter of a former manager of the country's water resources as our guide, puts the Mona reservoir to shame for sheer size.

Global warming and climate change are supposed to be delivering us super hurricanes. Thank God, none this year. But these destructive howlers drop off a lot of water which recharge aquifers and rivers and which can be stored, except that we have nowhere to do the expanded storage to meet the domestic and industrial needs of the population which have greatly expanded - both the population and the per capita water demand - since the last big dam was built two generations ago.

The planet is getting warmer, we're told. A news agency report out of Copenhagen said, "this decade is on track to become the warmest since records began in 1850, and 2009 could rank among the top-five warmest years, the UN weather agency reported ... on the second day of a pivotal 192-nation climate conference." And, the current decade has been marked by dramatic effects of warming."

What is causing the warming of the globe? The overwhelming weight of scientific opinion is that it is human action in the release of greenhouse gases, largely derived from burning fossil fuels which is driving this cycle of warming. But there have been previous cycles of planetary warming and cooling. And there are sceptics of the anthropogenesis of global warming, who are mostly shouted down by the establishment.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] won the Nobel Peace Prize last year for its anthropogenic report on global warming and climate change, a report to which UWI physics professor and climatologist Anthony Chen contributed and so shared in the prize. The IPCC, like everybody else, relied on data generated by the world-famous Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia [CRU/UEA] in the UK.

global firestorm

Steam clouds pour out of the cooling towers of a lignite-powered energy plant west of Cologne, Germany, in this March 27, 2004, file photo. – File

Hackers [undercover researchers?] have set off a global firestorm in the scientific, environmental and policy communities when they released, timed just weeks ahead of Copenhagen, mined email exchanged among CRU researchers indicating that data which didn't fit had been discarded - a cardinal sin in science.

The Times Environment Editor reported, as I passed through London, and I give it fairly extensively, that, "Scientists at the University of East Anglia have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based. It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

"The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU's [current] director. In them he discusses thwarting climate [change] sceptics seeking access to such data.

"The CRU is the world's leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures," the environment writer noted. "Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled [the hallowed principle of replicability in scientific research]. This is now impossible."

"'The CRU is basically saying, 'Trust us'", says Roger Piekle a professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, who were among those asking for the raw data. "'So much for settling questions and resolving debates within science,'" Piekle lamented.

Despite this little hiccup, Professor Jones and his colleagues at CRU/UEA insist, The Times said, that, "This temperature rise is 'unequivocally' linked to greenhouse gas emissions generated by humans". And, "their findings are one of the main pieces of evidence used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says global warming is a threat to humanity."

That threat is about to substantially reconfigure geo-politics. While proclaiming that "the leaked University of East Anglia's emails are a scandal", The Times, in an editorial, pressed on to conclude, the views of those who disregard the accumulated evidence for global warming, its causes and consequences, such as the CRU an IPCC data and conclusions, should be of no interest to any scientist, "save perhaps for a psychologist". "For those who believe the world's temperature is changing and that humanity is, at least, partly responsible (a group that includes the IPCC, every major government on Earth and this newspaper)", the paper said, "the [Copenhagen] conference represents a major opportunity to limit worldwide CO2 emission. Any agreement could have major ramifications on the GDP of nations and the lives of billions."

On the same day and subject, the Daily Mail was more sceptical, literally praising a group of senior conservatives, led by former Home Secretary David Davis, which had "taken issue with their leadership's approach to the environment ... warning of the dangers of imposing huge economic costs on our battered economy on the basis of disputed scientific evidence." Davis' views were also extensively and sympathetically carried by the paper. The Daily Mail argued that, "in the past David Cameron has gone out of his way to pander to the green lobby." It is to the media to which the ordinary citizen must look for untangling and making sense of this mess.

a miracle is needed

A Guardian writer, having set out what Copenhagen hopes to achieve, bluntly concluded that, "a miracle is needed for a triumph. At the time of writing, the same paper headlined, 'Copenhagen climate summit in disarray after 'Danish text' leak - Developing countries react furiously to leaked draft agreement that would hand more power to rich nations, sidelines the UN's negotiating role and abandon the Kyoto protocol.' By the time this column is published, there will be more developments [or is it disarray?] from the 'Danish text'.

A highly likely future scenario is that if the climate escalates its bad behaviour, for whatever reason, there will be increasing clamour for a central authority to take charge of matters and apply, by force, the fixes dictated by science, doctored or otherwise. And it won't be the impotent UN, at least not as it operates now as the world's biggest talk shop. Both climate change and the fixes are likely to seriously hurt the global economy, prompting more frantic calls for more drastic centralised action to rescue the economy.

A spiral of totalitarian control to save the planet emerges and the present 'persecution' of dissidents would only be warm-up child's play to what would then be unleashed.

Martin Henry is a communications consultant. Feedback may be sent to columns@gleanerjm.com.