The IEA could not have stage-managed a more dramatic backdrop for the launch of its 2007 World Energy Outlook. $100 oil says more about Chinese demand than a thousand forecast charts ever could. When the IEA’s Fatih Birol warns that "the wheels could come off" the world’s oil supplies, you have to believe him.

There are many good points well made in the IEA’s analysis. But there is something of a contradiction in its position: it wants oil producers, including Opec, to invest in capacity to produce more oil, while trying to persuade the world to use less of it. It is no wonder Opec is suspicious.

As Mr Birol says, however, the threat of oil shortages is fundamentally less of an issue than climate change. The world can eventually adjust to oil running out. Our chances of adjusting to a world that is six degrees C hotter do not look so good. And that, unfortunately, is about the size of the temperature increase implied by climate models given the IEA’s projections of what will happen under "business as usual" scenarios, with China doubling its coal-fired power generation capacity between now and 2030.

We should probably be grateful if the world never does get beyond 100m barrels a day of oil production, as Total’s Christophe de Margerie thinks it won’t. That would at least help keep climate change within manageable bounds. The IEA’s "alternative scenario", including more energy efficiency and renewables, needs a mere 100m barrels of oil a day in 2030, and keeps the temperature increase down to a - just about - bearable 3 degrees C. Unless we make up the shortfall from coal to liquids, of course.

George Monbiot, the environmental polemicist, can be erratic. But he is spot on in hailing the brilliance of Cormac McCarthy’s "The Road". If you can read that and still argue we shouldn’t worry about catastrophic climate change because it might not happen, you have a stronger stomach than I have.

The peace prize for Al Gore and the IPCC was a powerful boost to Mr Gore’s credibility, at the end of a week in which it had taken a bit of a battering.

The UK government was taken to court by Stuart Dimmock, a parent of two children at a state school, in an attempt to stop Mr Gore’s film "An Inconvenient Truth" being shown in classrooms. The case has been widely seen as the Scopes monkey trial of climate change.

The verdict was rapturously received by Mr Gore’s opponents. But as the Deltoid blog points out (you need to scroll down a bit), much of the reporting of the case did not do justice to the balance of the decision.

The judgment is worth reading in full: it is a good statement of an intelligent layman’s attempt to make an honest assessment of the evidence. The nine counts on which Mr Justice Burton faults Mr Gore are "errors", he says (the inverted commas are the judge’s) in that the film departs from the consensus position of the IPCC. What Mr Burton did not challenge was that:

"(1) global average temperatures have been rising significantly over the past half century and are likely to continue to rise ("climate change");

(2) climate change is mainly attributable to man-made emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide ("greenhouse gases");

(3) climate change will, if unchecked, have significant adverse effects on the world and its populations; and

(4) there are measures which individuals and governments can take which will help to reduce climate change or mitigate its effects."

He added: "These propositions, Mr Chamberlain [the government’s lawyer] submits (and I accept), are supported by a vast quantity of research published in peer-reviewed journals worldwide and by the great majority of the world’s climate scientists."

On the nine "errors", Mr Gore’s supporters have attempted to defend him, with mixed results. The claim in the film that "the citizens of these [low-lying] Pacific nations have all had to evacuate to New Zealand" really does not stand up. The evacuation of nations such as Tuvalu has not happened yet on any large scale, although there are plans for it.

On the polar bears drowning because they have to swim too far to find ice, however - a line that will play particularly strongly in the classroom - Mr Gore does seem to have a point.

All in all, the judge’s verdict seems the right one. "An Inconvenient Truth" can - and indeed should - be shown in schools, so long as teachers can fill in the gaps and correct the mistakes. The most important point of all comes up several times in the judgment: the important debate now is over the politics, and what we do about climate change, not over the science.

UPDATE: Bjorn Lomborg’s anti-Gore book is reviewed favourably in the FT, less so in Nature by Partha Dasgupta. As the Prof Dasgupta puts it: "He [Mr Lomborg] doesn’t question the science… he questions whether we should do much about it." The essence of Prof Dasgupta’s critique is this: "Even a small amount of uncertainty — when allied to only a moderate aversion to uncertainty — would imply that humanity should spend substantial amounts on insurance, even more than the 1– 2% of world output that has been advocated." That is Sir Nicholas Stern’s point, too: if there is a risk of catastrophic climate change, it makes sense to protect against that change, even if we think the risk may be small.

HSBC, one of the world’s biggest banks, has hired Sir Nicholas Stern, who wrote the UK government’s much-discussed report on the economics of climate change last year, to be an adviser to Stephen Green, its chairman. In May HSBC gave the largest donation ever by a UK business to groups researching and trying to tackle climate change and its effects (FT stories may require subscription). 

Other banks including Citigroup and Bank of America have also launched well-publicised initiatives to support the fight against global warming.

One does not have to be a die-hard cynic to observe that trading in greenhouse gas emissions and financing new energy sources, to name just two, create massive business opportunities, and banks that fail to exploit those opportunities are failing their shareholders. But as with many new markets. it is not yet clear where the best opportunities will be, and which activities will end up being rejected as valueless. Which is why we see a group of the leading banks trying to bring some order to the carbon markets.