At the same time, the supremely self-confident Viscount (Christopher) Monckton, the most vociferous of the advocates, came across as a clever undergraduate debater crossed with a snake-oil salesman. Various expensively-suited figures connected to big business hovered in the background. Whatever their arguments, they were not an attractive bunch. 

Far more sympathetic were the astronomers and solar physicists with whom I have spoken over what has been an eight-year study. Helped by a grant from the Sloan Foundation in New York, I travelled to 18 countries, on every continent, meeting scientists as far apart as Antarctica and Arizona, Tromsø (in arctic Norway) and Tokyo, Beijing and Bolivia, Jaipur and the Jet Propulsion Lab in California. All of them agreed on one point: that improved technology and new discoveries have meant that we are on the verge of — may even have begun — a golden age in solar research.

We understand more not only about the Sun's heat and luminosity, but what causes sunspots, when they will occur, how solar flares operate and what effects solar magnetic forces have on our planet. Modern telescopes are becoming ever more powerful, while we can create laboratory versions of plasmas whose behaviour mimics phenomena such as the explosion of stars, coronal ejections and solar prominences — huge gaseous arches that extend outwards from the Sun's surface.

And with the Solar Dynamics Obervatory, Hinode (a Japanese satellite), Stereo and Soho, there are more spacecraft than ever before studying the Sun. Within four or five years, Nasa is to launch Solar Probe Plus, which will reach to within ten solar radii, or 4,360,000 miles, of the Sun — so close that it will be able to look at the solar plasma as it is evolving. 

It is an exciting time, and I have found one conclusion unavoidable: as far as global warming is concerned, Al Gore's claim that "the science is all settled" is far from the truth. How can it be otherwise, when we are about to learn so much more about our nearest star? The Sun still has plenty of surprises for us. And as for our weather — as Joyce's Leopold Bloom so charmingly put it — it is "as uncertain as a child's bottom".