Cameron at a press conference today:

I think the point I would make is whatever your view about this issue, clearly we have had and are having some pretty extreme weather. So whatever your view about climate change, it makes sense to mitigate it and act to deal with that weather. That is the view of the whole government.

Sounds a little like Mike Hulme's recent take (discussed at P3):

What matters is not whether the climate is changing (it is); nor whether human actions are to blame (they are, at the very least partly and, quite likely, largely)...

It doesn't matter whether humans are to blame? Makes sense to `deal with the weather' and not worry about anyone's views?

What idiocy. If humans weren't causing it - if these were just natural variations - there would be no requirement to cut carbon (or other GGHs) and we could concentrate funding on resilience-building. Decarbonising our global infrastructure is a gargantuan challenge - not an impossible one, but it requires all parties to understand the science. Without that basic agreement, we're going to umm and arr our way into a climate shitstorm.

It's hard to say from that quote whether Cameron is just fudging the word `mitigate' (which would mean actually dealing with the carbon issue) or was just blathering. I suspect the latter, given he's comfortable with appointing a class A climate Gish galloper to the post of environment secretary.

But his line of argument is hugely dangerous: `look, chaps - we all have different views, but let's just concentrate on dealing with the weather right now shall we?' We can persist with dealing with the symptoms for a while, but in the end if we don't address the underlying cause, the disease will overwhelm our ability to cope.