“I have assured them that they cannot burn me at the stake because of all the dioxins my body will give off.” The bearded botanist emits a hoot at this scientific bon mot, but in truth he isn’t finding his current predicament very funny at all.
Ever since he stuck his head above the undergrowth to question the view that man-made carbon dioxide emissions are responsible for climate change, Bellamy has found himself frozen out of the debate on global warming. Rather than blaming pollutants, he argues that the current change in climate is simply part of an eons-old global cycle; one that humans are as powerless to stop as they are blameless in starting.
“Natural climate change has been happening for a long time,” he says. “If you were sitting in London 10,000 years ago there would be woolly rhinos walking around because it would be the end of the ice age. Now we are in a pretty wobbly phase and some people are saying that this is caused by carbon dioxide pouring into the atmosphere and drowning us all. I just don’t believe that.”
The problem is that the thought police of the conservation community will brook no dissent and have contrived to silence his voice and that of his supporters. “I always thought that was what science was all about: arguing publicly and publishing both sides of the point, finding the answer,” he says. “But we simply cannot get our stuff published. They don’t tolerate dissent because they are not telling the truth. There is no consensus whatsoever on global warming; there are just as many people dissenting but they will not publish those papers in journals.”
He believes the reason that non-believers are being silenced is fear: after all it is reassuring to think that whatever the cataclysm ahead we at least have the power to head it off. Much less comforting to believe that there is nothing we can do.
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Bellamy, who endeared himself to a generation with his mangled pronunciations and saliva-soaked enthusiasm on television, might make an unlikely rebel, but that is what, reluctantly, he has become. He is no apologist for the car industry, he says, though his views are likely to be more acceptable around the water coolers of General Motors than Greenpeace.
“If you believe that CO2 actually is causing man-made global warming then the car is bad news,” he says. “But I think the car industry should be patted on the back. They are all doing their bit making more and more efficient cars, and increased fuel efficiency is a good thing because it will make the oil last longer.”
As it turns out Bellamy is himself something of a petrolhead. Like many of his generation who grew up between the wars during the golden years of automobiles, he has retained a deep attachment to the romance of motoring, although he emphasises that this has had no bearing on his professional opinions.
“I remember going to the Schoolboys’ Own Exhibition and meeting all the great civil engineers — you became enthused by this new form of engineering, the internal combustion engine and the thoughts that it could change the world, which of course it did. For young boys that was just amazing. I actually stood on the footplate of the Mallard engine and talked to the driver.”
Bellamy’s first encounter with engines came in the form of a motorbike when he was 11. “It was from the end of the (first) war, rusting at the end of a garden and cost us a quid,” he remembers. “We spent the whole summer getting it going again and then we ran it on lighter fuel. In those days police turned a blind eye, it was just lads being lads.”
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His first car was a second-hand Austin 7, bought with a group of friends in the late 1930s for £27. “We stripped it, cleaned it up and started to race it. We even sawed the front axle in half and put a ring bolt in so we had independent suspension — which they did in the early days of Brooklands.”
At about the same time the young Bellamy began attending race meetings with his friend’s father, “Pop” Wright. “We loved it. We didn’t compete ourselves because you needed a brand new set of tyres to race and we couldn’t afford that, but you could go and stand in the pits and see drivers like Juan Manuel Fangio and there was that wonderful smell of Castrol R oil that made that lovely noise and fire out of the exhaust. It was wonderful.”
As a lab boy working at technical college in Surrey he splashed out on a succession of sporty two seaters but had to sell them when he went to university. “The last thing I did before the family started was build a Lotus Super Seven. Wow, that was great. I used to love the A69 with lots of bumps on it and I’d fly over the top of those in the Lotus. You had to be careful though not to take the sump off — it was very low.”
The image of Bellamy blasting along an A-road, his beard buffeted by the wind and a grin across his face as he flies over the bumps is hard to resist, but he says that his days of fast cars ended with the birth of his first son.
“I remember picking him up from the hospital in a Lotus and the nurse said, ‘You’re not taking him home in that are you?’ and I said, ‘Well if not then he’s walking’. That was when I realised I had to get a sensible car. That was it, I was on the downhill from that point on.”
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Today Bellamy, who still crisscrosses the country giving lectures on how to “patch up the planet and restore the balance that has been destroyed”, owns a Mazda6 diesel. He claims to be content with it. It is reliable and frugal and he keeps to sensible speeds so the engine operates at its optimum and doesn’t burn too much fuel.
Then he adds, as if for badness: “I fly all over the world now of course — so I use up more jet fuel than petrol from motor cars these days.”
On his CD changer
I was given an Elvis Presley CD for my birthday earlier this month, so that’s what I’m listening to at the moment