Certainly global warming has been a mixture of politics and science from the very beginning and we would hasten to say that politics of all sorts and kinds – both from the right and the left – has been injected here.

However, over the last few years, the fact of global warming has become increasingly clear. As more scientists suggest that it is happening – and that the cause is largely what man is doing – it becomes much harder to write off as just politics.

The latest word comes from a panel of the National Academy of Sciences that found from research that it has been at least 400 years and probably at least 2,000 years, or much longer, since world temperatures have been this hot.