Well, like the CRU has learned, we're in a world where it's probably best to presume everything you say is public. There are different sorts of public; I feel pretty confident that I'm uninteresting to any marauding horde of journalists. But it's had an impact on how I view expressing myself here. It feels like many things are changing fast and I can't quite orient myself.

The telly prog - can't find it on Google - followed some survivors of the 2004 Asian tsunami. There was a moment, on Banda Aceh I think, where two young men - one whose family had been wiped out - were discussing business ideas for getting trade back to a deserted beach. Then up stroll a bunch of baton-swinging sharia police: what are the women doing out at this time? Can you step away from her please, you're too close. You are not wearing enough, not covering yourself. (They were wearing full-length jeans.) Disobeying equals a prescribed beating, a certain number of times. Sharia seems to have followed the tsunami in some places; it was captured perfectly in that piece of film. They had no idea, were hanging out, dreaming of a future - next, men in uniform with hefty batons were telling them to step away from their girlfriends.

The historical nugget is from 414 a.d. Hypatia of Alexandria, a Platonist, pagan, pythagorean, and a genius married to maths and logic; 'physically attractive and determinedly celibate' according to Clifford Pickover. Then -

On a warm March day in AD 414, a crowd of Christian zealots seized her, stripped her, and proceeded to scrape her flesh from her bones using sharp shells. Next, they cut up her body and burned the pieces.

Other scholars, unsurprisingly, fled. That, according to Pickover, marked the moment when Greek progress in maths ended, and the torch passed eventually to Arabia and India.

Hypatia's horrible end must prompt quite different reactions depending on where you're coming from. Plenty of people claim we're all being hoodwinked by environmental totalitarians intent on imposing world government. Perhaps they think such eco-fascists are like those Christian zealots, I don't know. Of course, seeing scientists hounded and the press echo clear falsehoods, I have different sympathies.

Not that I have much of a stomach for armchair arguing right now. I'm a bit bored by my own bloggy righteousness and unsure what should happen next. Deltoid is probably doing the best job at the moment at cataloguing the serial blinders of the UK press. My own view is that, if we can't get to a sustainable world through democratic means, we're not going to get there at all. The argument has to be made. A totalitarian is as they are, regardless of their political stripe. The only thing I'm pretty sure of is, I'm not one, and most people who think increasing CO2 is a problem aren't either.

The way things are going now, it's comforting and terrifying in equal quantities. There was a moment, I think, where some of us wondered whether politics-as-we-know-it would be suspended, and the seriousness of the challenge would overturn the normal rules. Nope. The future will be a muddle, just as everything always has been, despite the fact that the science appears to tell us there's no muddling time. (Hey - maybe we'll end up 3 standard deviations away from that mean, in the right direction of course. Stanger things have happened.) If it transpires that climate scientists are correct, so be it. We'll have to muddle through. Mitigation and adaptation? Nothing new there I guess.

Still, I confess I'm scared. The Daily Mail last week took Phil Jones' BBC interview and did one of the following, I don't know which: were inredibly stupid, having not a single member of review and edit staff who understands statistics 101 - really, really uncomplicated stuff. Or they knew their twist on the story would sell, and didn't care about the truth. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised; what worries me is that a generation of people are learning its OK to conflate skepticism with radical doubt. If a scientist can't risk saying something as basic as "statistical significance" without having the second word misrepresented, how is anyone supposed to talk to the press?

This is all half-formed and I'm likely unwise to blarb on a blog. Trying to think about why I find it so scary: as a democrat, in the old-fashioned sense of believing people should have control over their own lives, communities and resources, I have to hope people can deliberate. How is that possible in a world where a major daily can turn "that's too short a timescale, it doesn't quite hit statistical significance" into "climate u-turn astonishment as prof sez no warming since 1995!" (The word astonishment only appears in the URL - I love the Mail's pithy article summaries in their URLs.)

As a species we're a skeptical bunch, and we generally don't like being hoodwinked one way or another. Purveyors of cargo-cult science will only get so far. As Stephen Colbert nicely points out, it's likely that we'll notice that, just because it's dark right now, the sun hasn't been destroyed. It's not rocket science, or possibly brain surgery.

If anything was connecting all those rantings, it was a worry that there's so much noise in the room, no-one is hearing anyone else. In the wake of tsunamis, a whole host of forces sweep into the vacuum, and a whole bunch of fears. I'm in a kind of splendid isolation at the moment, trying to dig the PhD out from my brain. I only see the world through this little computer window, and I hear stories here and there. I'm scared of my own silence. If a democrat wants a democratic future, it doesn't happen not talking to anyone. I don't know if anything via this screen really counts as talking.