David King

The headline trumpets "The War on Hot Air" and the Guardian interviewer Oliver Burkeman meets with Sir David King -- the man who persuaded the British government to take climate change seriously-- to ask him why he's now attacking the green movement.

Burkeman writes, "King, 68, is credited with first convincing Tony Blair of the overwhelming importance of climate change, but it's entirely in character that he now thinks some parts of the green movement are in danger of going too far. 'The risk is that people feel the problem is being so overstated that it simply can't be true,' he says. His book, The Hot Topic, co-written with the science journalist Gabrielle Walker, advises readers: 'Don't be 'greener-than-thou': the evidence suggests that making people feel guilty makes them less likely to act, not more.' The book is subtitled 'How to tackle global warming and still keep the lights on.' It is a sort of passionate call for judiciousness: an attempt to acknowledge the extent of the crisis, which King once argued was a bigger threat than terrorism, while keeping it within the realms of the imaginable - a problem to which we might all address ourselves, instead of seizing up in a paralysis of despair."