The dilemma is simple. The sustained hysteria over global warming is finally beginning to cost lives -- as it was bound to. Ignoring the laws of nature -- and the market place is nature at its purest -- will always exact a price. And the price is usually paid by the weakest and the most vulnerable in a society: of course, this will not include -- and never could include -- the well-heeled humbugs who have driven the hysteria in the first place.

We were told that one way of tackling global warming was to burn biofuels rather than fossil fuels: since replacement crops will absorb the carbon dioxide created when the biofuels combust, the transaction is said to be "carbon neutral".

Governments have thus been rewarding producers for growing biofuels -- with the result that in the US, many farmers prefer to grow them rather than food. Listen: I was the worst student ever to pass first- year economics at UCD, but I still understand the consequences of cutting supply. Prices go up.

And that's what's happened. Rice is roughly twice the price that it was a year ago. That's irritating for us, but perfectly catastrophic for the poor of the world. So serious is the problem that India (among many other countries) has outlawed the export of rice: a further interference in the market. And that's the way of such things: one correction obliges the market-molester to endlessly correct as the initial distortion caused by the first correction begins to rock the entire structure.

No-one can manage the consequences, because they are too complex and unpredictable.

Now, you might argue that increasing the price of food is a necessary, if tragic, step towards saving the world from global warming. But it is a strange morality indeed which also campaigns against a technology that could both make food cheaper, and biofuels easier to grow.

Yet the science of genetic modification can unleash the vast untapped resources which are locked up in the DNAs of different species.

As Swift so aptly put it: "that whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together".

Quite. Yet it is the political classes in Europe, with the eco-mob at their heels -- they who wax so hysterical about global warming -- who have prevented the development of GM products here. Supermarkets even boast "We sell no GM products", as witless as the 19th-century apothecary's response to Edward Jenner's discoveries: "No vaccination here".

Simply, GM will enable us to increase plant production, without greater use of fertiliser, for three purposes: to grow biofuels, to produce greater vegetable crops, and, finally, to cultivate special plants whose sole duty is carbon imprisonment. This last function is what the molluscs of the oceans did millions of years ago. By locking up atmospheric carbon in their tiny shells, in due course they became the great limestone, marble and chalk mountains of the world, thereby lowering the world's temperature, and making terrestrial life possible.

But the very people who grew hysterical at the prospect of GM crops five years ago are today at the forefront of shrieking about global warming. The mathematics of all this are quite simple. So too are the morals. What is less easy to understand is the philosophy which prevents us from the reaching the logical conclusion to which maths and morals direct us.

For if we are to move towards biofuels, either we have GM technology, or millions of people in the developing world (as it is incorrectly called, because a lot of it isn't developing at all) will die. There is no third way.

Now, you can argue that the world could do with a reduction of population, and since there is no obvious group rather altruistically volunteering for extinction, the winnowing out of unwanted bodies will have to occur naturally somewhere that the population is already growing faster than are local resources.

There is a name for such a place. It is Africa. Is this what people want? That Africans should die of hunger in their millions, in order that we should feel better because we are using carbon-neutral biofuels, even as we are outlawing the GM technology that will make those fuels, and foodstuffs, cheaper and more available?

It is an interesting morality which embraces this equation, especially since the mumbo-jumbo over global warming is usually propounded by people who declare themselves to be morally superior to just about everyone else on the planet.

You may just have gathered from my tone my position on this. It is that mankind can do almost nothing useful to lower global warming, and therefore we shouldn't try. But sideline that argument, and address the hypothetical possibilities of reducing CO2 levels by plant activity, without causing famine. That cannot be done without GM: moreover, changing the genes of plant life is what mankind has done ever since the invention of agriculture, in the alluvial gardens of Mesopotamia 10,000 years ago.