Governments and the media are in a state of panic over climate change. A recent mocked-up photograph in the Daily Telegraph showed the ill-fated Dome at Greenwich roof-deep in water. Glaciers are melting. Tropical islands like the Maldives threaten to disappear entirely. Starvation looms as agricultural land is desertified in blistering heat. Every weather event, especially every hurricane, confirms the threat.

I even saw the 2005 New Year Tsunami blamed on climate change -- although tsunamis result from tectonic plate movement, and have nothing at all to do with climate.

Bizarrely, the same climate change doomsters also predict bitter cold for the UK . Rising global temperatures, they say, will disrupt the Gulf Stream , which brings warm water from the Caribbean to the UK . Without the Gulf Stream , Britain could freeze like Leningrad .

Time for a reality check. Three decades ago, popular science books (and Time Magazine) were predicting "The Coming Ice Age". We were approaching the end of a 12,000 year "inter-glacial period", and we could expect a mile of ice over Edinburgh , perhaps within a decade. Around the same time, professional futurologists anticipated widespread starvation by the nineties, as population outstripped food production, with commodities, especially oil, running out entirely. They got it wrong.

More recently, we've seen the famous "Millennium Bug". Or rather we haven't seen it. We were in a state of panic in 1999. Some firms paid a fortune to consultants to solve the "problem". In the event, almost nothing happened.

There's a lesson here. "World about to end" is news. "Everything more or less OK" is not news. Consultants sell projects on over-hyped fears. And governments and bureaucrats extend their powers on the same basis.

What is new about the global warming scare is the way governments, and their bureaucracies (like the International Panel on Climate Change) have all adopted the same line, and have made scurrilous attempts to silence dissent. Climatologists who doubt the alarmist consensus (and there are a fair number of them) have seen funding and publication denied them.

The EU has used the alarmist threat to seize powers in new policy areas. It is pressing ahead with an "EU energy policy" (which may involve our remaining North Sea oil resources being handed to Brussels, much as our fisheries were thirty years ago). It has developed the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) as a device to control CO2 emissions, though as a recent Open Europe report shows, the ETS has in fact done little to reduce emissions. Its main effect has been to transfer funds from UK companies to continental companies, as a result of a disproportionate initial allocation of credits in France and Germany .

The theme of climate change alarmism underpins an excellent new thriller by Michael Crichton -- best known for "The Andromeda Strain" and " Jurassic Park ".

He likes to take a theme from current science and build a thriller around it. His new book "State of Fear " is another brilliant page-turner in the Crichton tradition, but alongside the fiction he builds in foot-note references to real, current, peer-reviewed research. And for those whose knowledge of global warming issues is based on media scare-mongering, or on Al Gore's recent film, the science may come as a surprise.

Did you know, for example, that the world today is cooler than it was in 1200 AD, the Mediaeval Warm Period? Or that the USA (with some of the world's best climate records) is cooler today than it was in 1930? That the Antarctic contains more than 90% of all the world's ice, and that over the last twenty years, records show the Antarctic cooling slightly? And the Antarctic ice-mass increasing? It's growing at 26.8 gigatons a year, as it happens, reversing a 6000 year melting trend.

There is certainly evidence of warming trends in big cities, but then with millions of people and acres of concrete, high-rise buildings, heating and air-conditioning, that's what you would expect. It is a local, surface effect, not a global effect. And many small towns and rural areas show cooling.

The sea level is supposed to rise. It has indeed been rising, by a few inches a century, as long as records have been kept. But there is no evidence of any significant increase in the rate of rise.

We hear of the damage that global warming might do, but no one mentions the benefits. Plants grow better with more CO2, and already the southern borders of the Sahara desert are in retreat as plants colonise the sand. If there were significant warming, then huge areas of land in northern Eurasia and Canada would become cultivable.

We are urged to support the Kyoto protocol, yet the best scientific opinion shows that if Kyoto were fully implemented (it won't be), the effect on average global temperature in a hundred years time would be less than 0.2°C -- almost too small to measure. And if we in Britain were to turn off the whole of our economy and revert to hunter-gathering, China alone would make up the slack on CO2 emissions in just over a year.

Crichton notes that the global warming scare emerged around the end of the eighties, just about the time that the Cold War ceased to be seen as a threat. It's almost as though the powers-that-be need a good scare story to justify various new taxation and global governance initiatives. There could be a conspiracy theory here.