Gerald Warner: Flatulent cows and light bulbs won't kill us, but Cern could

First snapshot: beneath the Franco-Swiss border last week, Cern physicists restarted the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), repaired after blowing up last year, in an effort to recreate conditions within millionths of a second of the Big Bang, despite opposing scientists claiming it could destroy the planet by generating black holes, "strangelets", monopoles, black energy, vacuum energy, or – the most menacing scenario – some totally unforeseen outcome.

Second snapshot: in Copenhagen, harassed administrators and ecstatic hoteliers are preparing to host the great Scarefest conference on "manmade" climate change, to be attended by scientists and politicians close to nervous breakdown, from fear that the planet could imminently be destroyed by somebody using the wrong kind of lightbulb or some cows breaking wind.

The interesting aspect of these two starkly conflicting pictures – the cavalier insouciance of the Cern boffins playing with the most mind-bogglingly powerful forces of nature and the nail-biting terror of the climate-change alarmists – is that both are representative of the mainstream scientific community. Why, then, does that same community exhibit so casual a demeanour with regard to experiments that some dissenters claim could not only obliterate Earth but cause "perturbation of the universe", while recoiling in terror from the threat of bovine flatulence?

There is no inconsistency about these contrasting stances: in both cases the scientists are following the big bucks. The long-suffering taxpayers in the member states of Cern (Conseil Europen pour la Recherche Nuclaire) have already contributed 4.4 billion to this project. Cern has 2,600 full-time employees, with nearly 8,000 associated scientists and engineers browsing on the verge; altogether, 80 nationalities have their snouts in the trough.

Yet Cern, with its planet-killing potential, is financial small-beer compared to the funding that is being gobbled up by the climate change cult. Five years ago it was possible to calculate the billions of pounds that were being appropriated by that cult; today it is measured in percentages of GNP in nations around the world. Of course, the "mainstream scientific community" is on-side. Grants by the thousands, prestigious committees, government advisory posts, quangos, sinecures, power, celebrity – what's not to like? What if Al Gore's Convenient Untruth was a complete crock – who's complaining when the cash dispensers are rolling?

At Cern, the cult of the Higgs boson and the obsessive quest for information regardless of potential cost epitomises the narcissism of the scientific community. It is fanatically defended by useful idiots with O-Level physics who subscribe to Science Today and respond with hysterical abuse to any suggestions that some modest degree of accountability should be imposed upon the white-coated priesthood.

No layman knows the hazards of the Large Hadron Collider. Nor does any scientist. Years ago, any suggestion that the LHC might create a black hole was dismissed with a patronising smile. Today, it is commonplace among scientists supportive of the LHC to estimate it will create, on average, one black hole per second. That is not a problem, since they will evaporate due to Hawking Radiation. Unfortunately, an increasing number of scientists dispute the existence of Hawking Radiation – and Stephen Hawking himself is not 100 per cent sure. So, what is Plan B?

The technical achievements of science have outpaced its ethical maturity and social responsibility. Physicists are now dealing with massively powerful and unknown forces. That demands deference to the precautionary principle. In the words of the Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees, a supporter of Cern: "It isn't good enough to make a slapdash estimate of even the tiniest risk of destroying the world."

Scientists cannot be permitted to charge headlong into every avenue of investigation without external, objective assessment of risk. An international jurisprudential authority should be established for this purpose. Infatuated devotees of the cult of scientism yelling inanities about "Galileo" and "Inquisition" have nothing to contribute to responsible debate. We live in an age of exaggerated regulation. Yet building a conservatory is fraught with more restrictions than colliding particles to generate temperatures 10,000 times hotter than the sun. When an earlier explosion damaged the LHC in March 2008, due to a mathematical miscalculation, the director of the laboratory that had supplied the equipment was quoted as saying: "We took a pratfall on the world stage. We are dumbfounded that we missed some very simple balance of forces." Very reassuring. The next pratfall could be galactic.

Meanwhile, those who believe global destruction imminently looms from lightbulbs and cattle will gather at Copenhagen to impose intolerable restrictions on our lives and impoverish the peoples of the developing world. You might call it a democratic deficit.