On Saturday morning, a specially-chartered train bound for London was waved off by the Bishop of Bradford.

The Right Reverend David James was symbolically sending his best wishes to the people aboard the train who were taking part in a demonstration in the capital prior to the start of the two-week United Nations Copenhagen conference on climate change.

They wanted our Government to press for international agreements in the Danish capital to protect the world’s poorest, most vulnerable peoples.

One of the demonstrators was Professor Paul Rogers, from Bradford University’s Peace Studies department and author of the Oxford Research Group’s latest report, Global Security After The War On Terror.

In the report, he says: “Since the reorientation of the world economy towards a globalised free market... the gap between the richest fifth (of the world’s population) and the remaining majority has widened spectacularly.

“The richest fifth is at least 70 times as wealthy in terms of per capita Gross National Product as the poorest fifth.”

Adherents to the latest catastrophe theory of climate change aren’t just preoccupied with rising sea levels demolishing the East Coast of Yorkshire. Like the people on the train, they are concerned about the effects of climate change generated by the wealthy West upon Latin America, South East Asia and, above all, Africa.

The Bishop said: “There are all sorts of factors involved in climate change. There have been mini ice ages before. I know it’s not only us, but we are contributory and it requires a concentrated effort by all of us.

“I always try to plant a tree every year, I drive a small car and keep the heating bills as low as I can. Reducing carbon emissions is, I think, the single most important issue.

“If I could choose one thing to come out of Copenhagen, it would be agreement to put a tax on aviation fuel worldwide. That’s one simple thing that would make a difference.”

The Bishop, who flew out to Pakistan yesterday, said he did not fly for pleasure. Whenever he was travelling in Europe, he always tried to go by train.

Like the Bishop of Bradford, Professor Rogers does not accept the apocalyptic doomsday scenario of some climate change zealots; he remains optimistic that, like with the threat of nuclear weapons, we have the capacity to avert disaster.

“The threat to the ozone layer, first reported in 1983, has reduced because there was prompt international agreement to phase out pollutants, but it will be another 30 years before it repairs,” he says.

“The real effects of climate change will be felt 20 to 30 years from now, but action must be taken in the next five, and politics is not good at dealing with the long term.

“If I had three wishes that Copenhagen could make come true, they would be a move towards a more low-carbon economy in the industrial world, that we could then ask the Indians and Chinese to follow suit, and finally to provide more help to poorer countries, such as developing new crop variations that are drought-resistant.”

Dr Richard North is a Bradford-based political researcher and author of a book called Scared To Death, an analysis of predicted human catastrophes, from BSE to global warming. He was not on the train to London.

“Global warming is a superb opportunity to meddle with people’s affairs – and make them pay for it in taxation,” he says. “Government loves it because it is running out of taxes. Big Business loves it because the green agenda generates more business out of thin air.”

So, cimate change may be the reality some insist it is. Or it may be like Hans Christian Andersen’s story of the emperor’s new clothes, which people believed in because they did not want to be thought stupid by their friends or neighbours.