While climate connoisseurs and hairy sandals sequester themselves to play the blame game for last week’s disastrous UN climate change conference in Copenhagen, sensory psychologists should be kicking themselves for not giving world leaders a taste of what a future atmosphere would smell like. The biggest kicks are saved for Belgium where researcher at the University of Leuven Omer Van den Bergh is an expert in human reaction to increased CO2. Quoted in Avery Gilbert’s fascinating What the Nose Knows (Crown, 2008) “within 20 seconds of breathing CO2-enriched air, a person experiences tightness in the chest, a feeling of choking or smothering, a pounding heart, sweating, hot flushes, and anxiety. The symptoms disappear quickly when the CO2 is reduced to normal levels.” With heads of state from two dozen countries meeting behind closed (and airtight) doors for a couple of hours on Friday, what an ideal opportunity to crank up the thermostat and pump in some CO2 to ensure a result.

Infamous SA sensory psychologist

Although if the CO2 had worked and winkled out an agreement, environmentalists would hardly have been “popping champagne corks popping [sic] in every corner of the world” as the Guardian fondly imagined they would as this fizz from France is packaged in the heaviest bottles around with XXXL carbon footprints. Only the Observer’s wine hack Tim Atkin opportunistically makes an exception for Champagne in his one man Campaign Objecting to Carbon-Unfriendly Packaging, COCUP.

SA could have assisted in Copenhagen as activists will remember the activities of another Van den Bergh “researcher” – General “Lang” Hendrik van den Bergh – onetime head of BOSS (Bureau of State Security) who had all kinds of novel ways of making people change their tunes. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

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