WHAT WOULDN'T YOU GIVE TO APPEAR ON THE MALTHUS-DENIER STONE?

What happened was this. Anglia Ruskin staged a 'Sustainable Art' competition and the winning entry was a 6ft high mock stone slab (made out of plywood) engraved with the names of six notorious 'climate deniers' including me, Christopher Booker and Lord Lawson, no less.

It's a handsome piece of art, clever too because in ingenious installation-y style a continual stream of symbolic engine oil cascades down the face of the slab, which bears the legend 'Lest we forget those who denied.' But I think what probably clinched it wasn't the design or the technical skill but the impeccable correctness of its politics.

The piece's creator, a third-year fine art student called Ian Wolter, clearly knows how to please a sustainability prize judging panel. He declared: 'With this work I envisage a time when the deliberate denial of climate change will be seen as a crime because it hinders progress towards a low-carbon future.'

So young, so certain. I wonder what deep background research led him to form this considered view. Actually, no I don't, because it's obvious. He'll have got it from his science and geography teachers at school; from BBC nature documentaries and news reports; from comedians like Dara Ó Briain and Marcus Brigstocke; from celebrity mathematician Simon Singh, whispery-voiced gorilla-hugger David Attenborough and pouty-mouthed astronomer Brian Cox; from every other article in the Guardian; from the Science Museum in London; from Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth; from his fellow students and university professors; from the '97 per cent' of scientists who, so legend has it, say the science on global warming is settled... .

Never once, in all likelihood, will young Ian ever in his entire life have been put in a position where he has been given intellectual permission even to consider the possibility that the sceptics might have a point. 

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