While a brass band played Christmas carols on the platform at St Pancras, the “green train” set off for Copenhagen, via Brussels on Friday evening.

This is only one of the hundreds of train journeys being made to Copenhagen for the UN climate summit, which begins on Monday. One much longer journey is almost finishing for a group of Asian attendees who set off some weeks ago through China and on the famous Trans Siberian Express across Russia, then down through Northern Europe to Copenhagen.

Controversy about how to react to climate change looks set to continue long beyond this month’s Copenhagen meeting. For the world’s policymakers, the question is largely about what action should be taken, and how to reach agreement on it. But for some critics (recently emboldened by the Climategate emails) the debate is about the science. Carbon trading systems, despite being popular with policymakers, are probably the most controversial solution (look at the heated – to put it mildly – exchanges between Joe Romm and the Breakthrough Institute as an example).

Mike Hulme, a climate scientist at East Anglia University and founding director of the Tyndall Centre, had some of his own emails stolen from CRU servers. He is also the author of a new book that looks at some of the issues raised by the scandal: specifically, how our current views of climate change arise from our different political views, and in turn is based on the ‘stories’ that way tell ourselves, as individuals and societies. There is, for example, the ‘fragile mother earth’ story, in which humans destroy nature with their profligate consumption. Or the technological triumph story, in which humanity develops a way out of peril.

It might all sound more literary theory than climate science or economics. What does it mean for the Climategate, or for how to move forward on climate change?

From the BBC:

The organisation’s chairman Dr Rajendra Pachauri told BBC Radio 4′s The Report programme the claims were serious and he wants them investigated.

“We will certainly go into the whole lot and then we will take a position on it,” he said.

“We certainly don’t want to brush anything under the carpet. This is a serious issue and we will look into it in detail.”