IS man-made climate change a myth? Is this the week that will save the world? Does the alleged data-fiddling in East Anglia make any difference?

The answer to all these questions is of course “no”. But we live in an age when everything is over-simplified and over-hyped and the strongest stories rarely last more than a week without journalists looking for (or inventing) another “angle”.

The scientific facts are very clear. Over the last 150 years (the era of coal-based industrialisation followed by the oil economy) the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased.

The average temperatures across the earth (atmosphere, oceans and land) have increased. The weather has become more erratic and more extreme.

Anyone who believes that these things are not linked is indeed (in Gordon Brown’s words) a flat-earther.

Of course it’s a lot more complicated that this. There may well be natural causes of some of the reported changes – there are cycles in things like the amount of heat coming from the sun and the wobbles in the earth’s orbit.

And we can never say that an individual weather “event” is directly caused by coal-fired power stations in China, or whatever. What we can observe is that the extreme weather “events” – flooding in Cumbria, drought in Australia, cyclones in the Caribbean – are becoming more frequent and more violent.

But when you put it all together and look at the overall trends over a century or more, not just year to year, there really is little doubt. Which is why 19 out of 20 climate scientists throughout the world now agree – man-made global warming is very real and we have to do something about it.

Fifty-six leading newspapers in 45 countries yesterday published a joint editorial headed “Fourteen days to seal history’s judgement on this generation”.

They wrote: “Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security.”

That is obvious to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear. (And a brain to use).

But an apocalyptic 14 days when everything will be revealed and agreed? Come off it!

Life and the world are not like that. What the gathering at the Copenhagen Climate Summit must signal is a new start and the most serious one yet.