In an article published in November 2007, Christopher Booker wrote in the Telegraph that the coverage of climate trends “carefully ignores the latest US satellite figures showing temperatures having fallen since 1998, declining in 2007 to a 1983 level - not to mention the newly revised figures for US surface temperatures showing that the 1930s had four of the 10 warmest years of the past century, with the hottest year of all being not 1998, as was previously claimed, but 1934.”

And in a blog on USA Today this week, Doyle Rice quoted an article in Natural Geoscience which claims that only about half of the warming that occurred during a natural climate change 55 million years ago can be explained by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Further:

Right from childhood, in school and outside, we are told that the climate is changing, to ominous effects. Industry is pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, leading to the greenhouse effect and a general rise in global temperatures. There are several problems with this premise. One, it assumes that carbon dioxide is the sole contributor to global warming. Second, it takes climate to be a calculable entity that can be estimated by ever-complex models. As events in the real world keep reminding us, the only thing that can be said with certainty is that there is no certainty to the way the world moves.

As governments meet again in Copenhagen later this year and argue about the levels of emissions they must accept for the world to be a safer place for our future generations, perhaps we must probe and question whether there is really a need for carbon dioxide emissions to be cut. What if developing countries like India agreed to a compromise formula under which they cut their emissions against some quid pro quo with the West, and in the end of it all, some new model said a completely new agent is responsible for global warming?

Will we then go looking for new Kyotos and Copenhagens like chickens with their heads cut off?

In the euphoria surrounding the Delhi High Court judgment that decriminalised homosexuality, an important point — one that has some relevance with homosexuality’s wider acceptance in society — is being ignored: homosexuality is not just about gay sex.

The law will come to accept “sexual acts against the order of nature” but what about “emotional acts against the order of nature”? Isn’t discussing and accepting the latter more ground-shifting than the former?

I was listening to a panel on CNN-IBN debating the issue when, provoked by the aggressive sermonising of the religious leaders on the panel (“they can do what they want in private; just don’t expect my God to defend it”), Sunil Gupta, out-gay photographer, threatened to walk out if they (the religionists) kept referring to gay people as “them”. “I am not them. I am us—look into the mirror and you’ll see me,” he exhorted.

Mr. Gupta’s anguished cry goes some way in demonstrating what a sexual revolution should ideally constitute. The debate, unfortunately, has centred on the letter of the law and gives little credence to the genuine emotional needs of certain men to love other men. If it was framed in that context, and within the larger framework of family and stable relationships, the call for acceptance will find many more takers.

Mr Gupta said as much, when he hailed the verdict for allowing him and his partner to present themselves as a couple to Mr Gupta’s family. “We are very much like you,” he told his more conservative relatives, “we are a family.”

The trouble with a movement that lays too much emphasis on the details of the sexual act to drive home the very valid demand for greater acceptance is that it risks running afoul of the vast majority, not all of whom may be bigoted. If an ordinary conservative housewife were asked her views on the verdict, she may smile slyly and then, all-aglitter, denounce it for purporting to kill the family as that institution is known. “It’s unnatural for two men to do it,” she may say.

However, if she were told about a long-term stable relationship such as Mr Gupta’s and that the verdict is only the first step towards greater legal representation for people who happen to love their own sex, she may have her doubts.

Equality for LGBTs ought to be predicated within the confines of the family, so that the definition of a couple can be broadened to include two husbands, two wives, or, of course, a husband and a wife. Re-framing the debate in these terms will remove some of its rancour because most people have an image of the gay community that, justifiably or not, revolves around terms like promiscuity, wanton sex, and ruined lives. Popular movies such as the recent Brokeback Mountain only reinforce such stereotypes — of lonely men passing their time in wait of redemption.

The onus lies on both sides. Gay people need to do more to celebrate acceptance not by organizing wild parties that only bolster pre-conceived ideas (city supplements foolishly portray these parties as progress). Instead, they need to enlarge the canvas and welcome the shy, quiet, maybe even asexual members within their lot who don’t care two hoots about what all one can get up to in the bedroom, only that they be allowed to live in peace with someone of their own gender.

That is, if a more delicate engagement were allowed would religionists have a tough time explaining their bigotry.