No, don’t worry. The Goreistas haven’t got to me. It’s a sceptics’ conference – Have Humans Changed Climate? – being staged tomorrow by Tory MEP Roger Helmer. Many of my science and eco-heroes will be there, including Patrick Moore (the co-founder of Greenpeace who subsequently bailed when the charity turned far too red), Prof Fred Singer (who’ll be talking on Can We Trust The IPCC?) and Professor Ross McKitrick (who famously helped expose the notorious Hockey Stick curve).

I’ll be there to provide comedy value and also to talk about the irresponsibility of the mainstream media in spreading climate-change fear and largely suppressing any counter-argument in the great AGW debate.

There’s a good example of this from the latest Newsweek, which recently ran a cover story on Al Gore billing him as The Thinking Man’s Thinking Man.  The majority of letters it received in response – 74 per cent – were critical, says Tim Graham at Newsbusters. But Newsweek didn’t run one of them; only letters in support of Gore.

The worst was from war veteran Lee Bidgood Jr of Gainesville, Florida:

Propaganda by global-warming skeptics and deniers reminds me of 1944, when as an Army officer I saw living skeletons in striped pajamas. Horror stories about Nazi concentration camps suddenly rang true. I wondered how intelligent people could commit such atrocities. History records the effectiveness of Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda. I hope Al Gore and others can prevail over today’s anti–science propaganda.

Gosh I do hope they got their fact checkers onto that one. Otherwise, I’d suspect that this was the concoction of some young eco-freak who wasn’t even born in ‘44 using the Holocaust and the respect we grant war veterans to make a cheap political point.

Newsweek’s censorship doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. Its what the MSM generally does with anti-AGW stories – despite the fact that the majority of the public is now sceptical. Problem is, there are lot of people out there – media owners, environmental correspondents, carbon traders, big businessmen – who for a range of reasons from the emotional to the financial simply cannot afford to abandon their blind faith in ManBearPig no matter how compelling the evidence to the contrary.

We climate change sceptics would have lost the battle long ago had it not been for the happy advent of the internet. It’s in the Blogosphere (and a few odd MSM strongholds such as The Wall Street Journal and Christopher Booker’s Sunday Telegraph column) where all the counterarguments are being disseminated.

And despite what Professor Ian Plimer said in his Spectator lecture last week, this is a war we’re fighting. Plimer was talking about how the language of war had no place in science because it is simply a process of discovery, with one hypothesis being replaced by another. I’d agree with this if I thought science was the only factor in the global warming debate, but sadly it ain’t. It’s at least as much about politics, money, economics, horse-trading, personalities and perhaps above all about propaganda, ranging from responsible reporting to cheap shots about the enormous, badger-esque vastness of The Hon. Sir Jonathan Porritt’s rear end. That’s where scumbags like me come in. It’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it. For the children, you understand.

What he has to say in Spectator Coffee House about the Conservatives’ new non-policy on Europe is an essential read.

He starts off quite kindly towards Cameron. Nelson understands as well as anyone that Cameron WILL be our next prime minister and that, a bit like parents and schoolteachers are supposed to do with children, you can’t forever be telling him how rubbish he’s going to be. If you’re going to criticise, first you must say something nice. So Nelson does:

He is right not to promise what he calls a “made-up referendum”, that would accomplish nothing other then vent rage.

Semi-compliment over and done with, Nelson sticks in the knife. Cameron’s promise to renegotiate powers from Brussels is a nonsense, he explains.

What the new Tory package amounts to is a promise to ask the EU very nicely if it will consider handing back a few powers over employment and justice. The answer will be ‘no’. Saying that he might hold a referendum over a wider package of guarantees will carry no weight. By ignoring the Dutch and French ‘no’ votes the EU has shown that it cares not a jot what the little people think. It is a project of the elites, for the elites.

Given that the EU is guaranteed to crush all the Conservatives’ pathetically feeble attempts to claw back tiny bits and bobs of British sovereignty, what is the answer? There is, says Nelson, only one thing that will frighten the EU bullies – a referendum on whether Britain should remain in the EU at all.

The ‘in or out’ question is seen as an extreme position in Westminster, which shows just how out of touch our political class has become. Brussels’s own polling shows that less than a third of the British public consider our membership of the EU to be ‘a good thing’ — and this was last year when our net contribution to the EU was just £3.1 billion. Next year it will be £7.8 billion (due to the budget deal the would-be President Blair negotiated) and serious questions will be asked as to whether all these regulations are worth the money we pay for them. Recent EU research shows that just 37% think the benefits of EU membership outweigh the costs.

Perhaps some Kool-Aid drinkers out there will be able to tell me what wonderful benefits Britain will get from the EU mafia in return for that £7.8 billion protection money. Perhaps they’ll also be able to explain why, no really, Cameron’s policy announcement on Europe yesterday is as tough as tough can be and will eventually result in all sorts of powers being returned to Britain. The absolute right to decide on the size of the white margins on our postage stamps, maybe. Or the right of parents to chastise their kids lightly on the hand if they have stolen a car. Or the right of employers to sack any staff member found with his hand in till on more than 22 occasions.

Certainly I’m quite sure that whatever Cameron is planning, it will be – as Dan would no doubt say – the terrors of the earth.

And do you know what? I do not ****ing care. And I’m guessing that an awful lot of you reading this – those that aren’t still drinking the Cameroon Kool-Aid and repeating your consoling mantra about how “look, the important thing is to get Brown out, anything else is just icing on the cake…” – feel exactly the same way.

Is this a childish response? Quite possibly. But what it is, more importantly, is an honest and visceral response. This is the glory of the blogosphere. You don’t have to dress up your argument in supersubtle nuance. You can just cut to the chase and tell it like it is: the European Constitution has stolen British sovereignty; it will make us poorer, more highly regulated, less democratically accountable and less free. You cannot run an effective Conservative government within a Socialist Europe. You can’t. It is simply not possible.

Yeah, sure. If I sat down at a table right now with a bunch of lawyers, and wonks from Policy Exchange, and members of Cameron’s shadow cabinet, I’m quite sure that within the hour I would be won over. “Dear boy,” they’d persuade me in that wonderfully patronising mandarin way, “Of course we feel your pain and your rage. Everything you say is quite true. But in the real world….”

Ah yes, of course. That old saw about politics being the “art of the possible” – the weasel get-out of compromised politicians everywhere. Well I’m sorry, but that to me is not the language of realism. It’s the language of surrender and failure.

The reason I’m interested in politics is because I’m ideological. The reason I’m ideological is because I’m interested in what’s right and what’s wrong, what works and what doesn’t, what ultimately is going to make us all happier, richer and more free.

I still don’t see Cameron’s Pragmatic, Compassionate, but not that Conservative Conservatives offering us any of those things. (Obviously Blair/Brown’s mob didn’t either, but a) one never expected it of them and b) they’re really not worth writing about any more because they are toast). And their nuanced position on Europe – negotiating various opt-outs in certain key areas – is a case in point.

Not only is this mere tinkering at the margins (I notice for example, that they’re not even thinking about trying to extricate us from Europe’s crippling carbon regulations) but it’s most unlikely to work. As David Davis rightly (and rather bravely, given Cameron’s Stalinist line on dissent) argues in the Mail today, the EU “engrenage” machine is grindingly effective at crushing all attempts by constituent members who want to claw back tiny gobbets of sovereignty.

The Europeans are past masters at the permanent negotiation that makes up the federal project. They know all the tricks of isolation, pressure, delay, coalition, vague language, and institutional and judicial expansion.

Here’s the bottom line: until the day when, by whatever means, we can renegotiate our position in Europe so that it is little more than a friendly trading bloc, Britain is screwed.

If Cameron doesn’t understand this – and act upon it – then let us pray he’s replaced sooner rather than later by a leader who does.