Peter Preston is sounding a note of alarm at public scepticism and 'lethal inertia' over climate change. He himself proposes some of the reasons for it:
It isn't hard to collate the factors that drive disillusion. Professors with a colloquial touch writing "awful" emails; a recession so tough that it blows future shock away; a cold, cold winter the Met Office didn't forecast; scientific angst about swine flu revealed as way over the top; dodgy figures, dodgy reporting, dodgy issues way up to UN level.
But he worries that there'll be no progress in convincing people if there's simply 'more of the same' in the way of public advocacy. His conclusion:
[W]e surely need a prophet, not yet another committee. We need one passionate, persuasive scientist who can connect and convince - not because he preaches apocalypse in gory detail, but in simple, overwhelming terms. We need to be taught to believe by a true believer in a world where belief is the fatal, missing ingredient.
This is worryingly ambiguous counsel. Persuasive science and convincing people by argument - as much of this as it takes - are indeed what is required. But prophets and true believers we can do without. Preston seems to overlook a history in which would-be possessors of the Truth, Truth in dogmatic rather than scientific mode, thought their possession of it entitled them - as, precisely, prophets and true believers - to act against others in ways everything but rationally persuasive. Nobody needs to see the issue of climate change going down this path.