I went to an event in Bath yesterday, organized by the RSA – it was called ‘Converging World (Connecting Communities for Global Change) and 2050 Now’. Part of the attraction was hearing Jonathon Porritt speak – whether or not you agree with him, he’s an excellent speaker – and also because I like the idea of Converging World, which is a charity set up out of one of the RSA’s Coffeehouse Challenge initiatives to take a rather different attitude to carbon offsetting.

In the Q&A I happened to mention that the person sitting next to me was a teacher. Afterwards someone made a beeline for me. Was I the teacher? No, it was the person sitting next to me. Would he show Al Gore’s film to his students. No, because he didn’t think watching videos was what teaching was about. Would he show Channel 4’s The Great Global Warming Swindle? Erm, no, for the same reasons, plus it was not a very credible programme. But Gore’s film contained errors. Yes, but…

After about five minutes of ‘yes, but’s, my teacher friend said something like ‘Do you know this, or is it what you believe?’ I was slightly concerned that fisticuffs would follow, because he went on to make it clear that as a scientist he wasn’t really interested in her beliefs, only in the evidence. Brave man. We walked away unscathed.