If you want to know the truth about climate change, listen to ecological scientist Peter Taylor, for I believe that what he has to say is of immense importance – although heresy to the established view.

Climate change is not driven by carbon emissions, but natural solar and planetary forces – so we're wasting billions of pounds and dollars going completely in the wrong direction.

What we're actually facing is global cooling, not warming, yet climate change still holds great dangers, and it's preparing for these that we should be spending our money on.

Peter, who lives at Walton, near Street in Somerset, and whose book Global Cooling will be out next spring, said: "The huge amount of environmental concern, caring for the planet, is locked up in a completely inaccurate scary climate story.

"A consciousness of fear and guilt is being spread throughout the younger generation, and the real sadness is that what they are trying to get them to do, reduce their carbon footprint, will have no effect whatsoever on the climate in maybe the next half-century."

Although the science was far from settled, he said, the message from governments, environmental groups and the media was that carbon dioxide was the problem. But there would little in the way of backtracking because jobs, reputations, funding, government positions and huge industrial investments in renewable energy were now involved.

Global temperatures increased between 1980-2000, not due to manmade pollution as had been thought, but due to ocean cycles affecting cloud cover.

Now temperatures were falling because the electromagnetic energy of the sun was low, allowing more interstellar radiation into the solar system, creating more clouds which deflected the sun's heat.

This natural variability in ocean and weather systems was more powerful than the effect of CO2. "When you do the calculations, it dwarfs the computed CO2 effect," said Peter, who estimates that the "human signal" in climate change is only about 15 per cent.

He believes that the establishment will come to accept that global cooling has begun, and modify its models, but say that warming will start again in a decade or so, to save face.

Yet if natural variability can override the CO2 signal now, it could well have done so in the first place.

"If we cut CO2 levels by half – a huge task globally – we are dealing with maybe seven per cent of the driving force (of climate change) at massive cost, and the most important thing is that that has no effect on what the climate does," said Peter. "So all of that investment, if it's directed to avoid dangerous climate change, is completely wasted, and it takes attention way from the fact that climate change is happening now, it's natural, and it's dangerous now, because we're extremely vulnerable to any change, however tiny."

Global cooling would seriously compromise world food supplies, he warned, and put the price of fossil fuels through the roof, because of demand, when the whole social structure was dependent on cheap oil, gas and coal.

Peter provides the ecological science background for the Ethos environmental consultancy (see the website at www.ethos-uk.com).

He has advised governments, the European Commission and UN organisations, and has acted as a consultant to UK government agencies and non-government organisations on renewable energy policy and rural issues.