Leggett: Trace amounts of natural atmospheric gas will kill many millions of people

Jeremy Leggett: Burn Up makes our climate crisis into a drama | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Burn Up also addresses some of the questions that puzzle many of us who care about the climate threat to civilisation. Why do the carbon-club lobbyists and contrarians do what they do? What is in their heads as they go about their work? Surely they must see the power of the emerging evidence that the threat is real, and massive? Even if they don't, or can't, surely they must realise that there is uncertainty in the equation that can have horrible downside implications. Why, then, don't they show a little humility? This is not an armchair scientific debate. If the contrarians are wrong, and, for example, the Greenland and west Antarctic ice caps melt and destabilise, civilisation cannot easily survive.

How can transparently oil-funded scientific naysayers like Fred Singer keep spouting their disinformation with certitude, even as the scientific evidence hardens? How can the commissioners of naysaying for the media, like Channel 4's Hamish Mykura, persuade themselves that they are doing society a service? After Ofcom's ruling that The Great Global Warming Swindle had misrepresented climate scientists last week, Mykura – its commissioner – said: "Channel 4 believes in engaging with the debate in its fullest form, rather than closing it down. That is why this film was a valid contribution."

The true situation is that climate change, according to the vast majority of modern climate scientists (but not all), will kill many millions of people if it remains unabated. The holocaust, according to the vast majority of modern historians (but not all), did kill millions of people. Why is it a valid contribution to screen a film by one of the very few climate-change deniers, and not a film by one of the very few holocaust deniers?
My conclusion is that Mykura, Singer, Pearlman, Crichton and the minority like them have made it more likely that millions are going to die now, because they have diluted the collective will to abate global warming.

I still don't understand why or how they can do it.