The Scottish parliament discovered climate change this week – or rather the denial of it. The Futures Forum had decided to invite one of the last of the climate-change sceptics, the Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg, to address an invited audience in the Garden Lobby. I was asked to be the interlocutor.

Which I was happy to do. Some environmentalists argue that you should never share a platform with climate-change deniers. I take the opposite view – they should be welcomed. If it weren’t for people like Bjorn Lomborg, the issue wouldn’t be debated at all.

Journalism thrives on argument, but the argument on global warming is so one-sided it makes a very poor story.

The scientific consensus is so complete that few serious academics try to buck it. The national academies of science of all the G8 industrialised countries, and China and India, all agree that climate change is happening, we’re responsible for it, and something has to be done.

The editor of Science magazine, Donald Kennedy has described this as a “unique consensus” in scientific history. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirms, this as do many large companies. In June, 10 of Britain’s biggest firms, led by Tesco and BP, went to Downing Street to tell Tony Blair that they had to do something because their own researchers were already seeing the effects of global warming. Even Rupert Murdoch agrees.

No, the only debate, the only question about climate change is why we do nothing about it. Well, Bjorn Lomborg is one reason. This photogenic author of The Sceptical Environmentalist and “one of the 100 most influential people on the planet”, according to Time magazine, is feted across America for telling it what it wants to hear. But here’s the catch – even Bjorn Lomborg now accepts climate change. He told Holyrood on Thursday: “there is no doubt that climate change is happening and that the poorer countries will be hit hardest”. Game over.

Where he departs from the consensus is in what to do about it. Lomborg believes that there are more important things to worry about than something which may not have any impact for centuries. “Kyoto is a luxury we can’t afford,” he says. Better to spend $7 trillion on combating HIV, providing clean water to sub-Saharan Africa, combating malaria, etc etc. “Save people, not the planet,” he says.

Well, it’s a superficially attractive argument. And it seems to have a number of supporters in the Scottish parliament.

The Scottish Executive seems to think there are better things to spend money on – like billions for new motorways and fast links to airports. Despite its environmental mission statement, the Executive is rather to the right of Lomborg. At least the Danish statistician wants money to be spent on the poor, rather than on roads.

In promoting car use and air travel, the Scottish Executive is not only not doing anything about climate change; it is positively hastening its arrival by encouraging the two forms of transport most profligate in their use of fossil fuels. It is also destroying Lomborg’s thesis. Holyrood’s beha viour, like that of all western governments, shows that not doing something about climate doesn’t actually help anyone, certainly not the poor.

Lomborg says Kyoto is a misallocation of resources which should have gone to the Third World. But America’s boycott of Kyoto in 1998 didn’t lead to more resources for the wretched of the earth.

There have been no petrodollars flooding into sub-Saharan Africa. The US is still allocates the lowest percentage of GDP to development of any industrialised country. All Lomborg’s arguments do is delay any action about climate change, which is why he is so popular with American corporate interests.

Of course, there is doubt about what the impact will be. The scientific consensus is that global warming will lead to climate instability, but you can’t predict exactly how fast the glaciers will retreat or the polar ice melt. Scotland may get another mini-ice age as a consequence of the Gulf Stream going.

We do know the north pole summer ice is retreating at 8% a year and that researchers expect all summer ice to be gone from the Arctic Ocean in 60 years. But at the other end of the world, the Antarctic is mostly getting cooler. We are dealing with a hugely complex problem.

But what we do know is this: recent decades have seen the highest temperatures in 1000 years. Temperatures rise with increases in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. At around 360 parts per million (ppm), this concentration is currently the highest in 650,000 years, and it is set to rise dramatically in the next four decades, to 600ppm.

The government’s chief scientist, Sir David King, says the planet cannot sustain this without “consequences which are likely to be catastrophic in nature”. His job is not to be an environmental alarmist, but to distil the sum of scientific knowledge on a given policy issue and to make recommendations to the PM. His current advice is that “the maps of the world will have to be redrawn.”

Now, do we go along with the world’s leading climatologists? Or do we do nothing – along with Fergus Ewing MSP and a statistician from Denmark? In fact, do we go on promoting the very policies that are making this potential catastrophe more actual?

I know who I go with, and I hope the Scottish parliament, next time, will invite someone from that side.