A group of Nobel laureates met in London last week at the St. James Symposium on Sustainability and crafted yet-another-political-statement-from-scientists. The statement (here in PDF) shows how hard it is to rise above the noise on the climate issue. Kofi Annan and his 315,000 deaths? That’s nothing. Look at what the Nobelists came up with:

The solutions to the extraordinary environmental, economic and human crises of this century will not be found in the political arena alone. Stimulated by the manifesto of Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, the first Pugwash gathering of 1957 united scientists of all political persuasions to discuss the threat posed to civilization by the advent of thermonuclear weapons. Global climate change represents a threat of similar proportions, and should be addressed in a similar manner.

We are seeing an auctioning of promised devastation in an effort to corral attention on this climate issue. However, rather than motivate action via alarm, comparisons of climate change to thermonuclear war are probably going to lead to rolled eyes and a few laughs. Richard Cable at the BBC explains:

The qualitative difference between the two threats is perhaps nowhere better expressed, however inadvertently, than by the convener of the symposium himself, Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber. Where once we had ‘the Cold War notion of mutually-assured destruction,’ he told the Times, ‘Today we have mutually-assured increases in greenhouse gases.’

OK. But while debates around climate change are still qualified by the words ‘might’, ‘could’ and ‘predicted’, it’s probably fair to say that the average person in the street may view the comparison of carbon emissions with things that can vapourise a major city in seconds as unhelpfully alarmist and perhaps just a little bit silly.