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I've never supported the British National Party or the Ku Klux Klan. I've never belonged to the Paedophile Information Exchange, or denied the Holocaust, or made a penny from the banking crash. 

But if you read The Guardian newspaper's website, you might think otherwise. A commentator on it urged my own children to murder me.

He did so because of one of the many stories I've written for this newspaper about climate change. I first reported on the subject nearly six years ago: my article was about the 'climategate' scandal, where leaked emails showed university scientists were trying to cover up data that suggested their claim the world is hotter than at any time in the past 1,300 years may be wrong.

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Journalist David Rose has been labelled a 'climate change denier' after writing an article about the 'climategate' scandal

Ever since then, I have been labelled a 'climate change denier' – a phrase which, since I happen to be Jewish, has particularly unfortunate connotations for me. 

And this is despite the fact I believe the world IS warming, and that carbon dioxide produced by mankind IS a greenhouse gas, and IS partly responsible for higher temperatures – and have repeatedly said so.

On the other hand, I also think that the imminence of the threat posed by global warming has been exaggerated – chiefly because the grimmer computer projections haven't been reflected by what's been happening recently to temperatures in the real world. 

I do believe we should invest in new ways of generating energy, and I hate belching smoke stacks and vast open-cast coal mines as much as anyone who cares about the environment.

Mr Rose believes the imminence of the threat posed by global warming has been exaggerated, pictured are protesters at the largest anti-fracking demonstration to converge on Balcombe, West Sussex, in 2013

But I also think current 'renewable' sources such as wind and 'biomass' are ruinously expensive and totally futile. They will never be able to achieve their stated goal of slowing the rate of warming and are not worth the billions being paid by UK consumers to subsidise them.

Some would say this makes me a 'lukewarmer' – the jargon for someone who is neither a 'warmist' or a 'denier'. But true believers don't recognise such distinctions: to them, anyone who disagrees with their version of the truth is a denier, pure and simple. The result: vitriol directed my way, the like of which I have never experienced in 34 years as a journalist. Lately, it's become worse.

The remark about my children killing me was made some months ago, after The Guardian published one of several critiques of my work by its climate activist blogger, Dana Nuccitelli. One of the online commenters posted: 'In a few years, self-defence is going to be made a valid defence for parricide [killing one's own father], so Rose's children will have this article to present in their defence at the trial.'

Another commenter compared me to Adolf Hitler. Frankly, I didn't take either of them too seriously. But last week on Twitter, someone else wrote that he knew where I lived, and posted my personal phone numbers.

Meanwhile, Nuccitelli had written another vehement attack, this time against Matt Ridley, The Times columnist, Tory peer and fellow 'lukewarmer'. This fresh assault was illustrated by the paper's editors with a grotesque image of a severed head. One who commented, called 'Bluecloud', said: 'Should that not be Ridley's severed head in the photo... Why are you deniers so touchy? Mere calls for a beheading evolve [sic] such a strong response in you people. Ask yourself a simple question: Would the world be a better place without Matt Ridley? Need I answer that question?'

In fact, Bluecloud is a Guardian contributor called Gary Evans, who is also a 'sustainability consultant' funded by Greenpeace. Ridley complained, but the statements stayed on the website for at least four days. Comments in support of Ridley were removed by the site's moderators, because they did not 'abide by our community standards'. In an email to The Guardian's editor, Alan Rusbridger, Ridley pointed out that a Japanese hostage had just been beheaded by Islamic State.

Language only barely less extreme is now common. In the US, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has written that anyone who denies global warming must be 'punished in the afterlife… this kind of denial is an almost inconceivable sin'.

Observer columnist Nick Cohen says he is sick of hearing climate sceptics whinge that being called 'deniers' equates them with those who deny the Holocaust: 'The evidence for man-made global warming is as final as the evidence of Auschwitz. No other word will do.'

The office (pictured) of Bristol MP Charlotte Leslie was daubed in red paint after she voted in favour of fracking

MsLeslie (pictured) said the graffiti had not yet been cleaned off because the police are now treating it as a crime scene

A good clue as to what's making the 'warmists' so much hotter under the collar came last Monday when a Met Office press release stated: '2014 one of the warmest years on record globally.' Normally, one might have expected this to be given widespread coverage by broadcasters and newspapers. In fact, BBC news bulletins ignored it altogether. Only one national newspaper mentioned it.

The reasons? First, because, with admirable precision, the Met Office pointed out that as its measurements of global temperatures come with a sizeable margin of error, 'it's not possible to definitively say which of several recent years was the warmest'. All one could state with confidence was that 2014 was somewhere in the top ten.

Secondly, because the previous week, almost every broadcaster and newspaper in the world had screamed that 2014 was emphatically The Hottest Year Ever. They did so because NASA told them so. Its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), the custodian of one of the main American temperature datasets, had announced: 'The year 2014 ranks as Earth's warmest since 1880.' If you'd bothered to click on the sixth of a series of internet links listed at the end of the press release, you could have found deep within it the startling fact that GISS was only '38 per confident' that 2014 really did set a record. 

In other words, it was 62 per cent confident that it wasn't. Another detail was that the 'record' was set by just two hundredths of a degree. The margin of error was five times bigger. These boring details were ignored. The '2014 was a record' claim went to the very top. President Obama cited it in his State of the Union address. Like the news outlets, it's unlikely he will issue a correction or clarification any time soon.

The larger truth that lies behind The Hottest Year That Probably Wasn't, as it should probably be correctly termed, is the reason why I'm a lukewarmer. The figures show that global warming is proceeding much more slowly than it did in the 1980s and early 1990s, and much slower than computer models project. In 2013, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said that between 1998-2012 the rate was 0.05C per decade. Six years earlier, the same body predicted it would be four times higher – 0.2C per decade.

The global warming 'pause' – the absence of any statistically significant warming trend in surface temperature records – goes back to 1997; 18 years. Satellite measurements say it is even longer than that.

Now, predicting the future is hard. The atmosphere is a complex and chaotic system. Changes in the output of the sun, in levels of soot, the effects of warming on CO2-absorbing plants, clouds and ocean temperature cycles all have potentially big impacts. They don't affect that basic proposition – that human activity causes warming, but do substantially affect its rate – how fast the world is warming.

There is still argument among scientists over just how flawed the models are, but it's clear that if the pause goes on much longer, they will be seen as not fit for purpose.

You might think that some of the high-profile failed predictions of recent years might have induced caution. Al Gore repeatedly suggested that the Arctic would likely be ice-free in summer by 2014. In fact Arctic ice has recovered in the past two years, and while the long term trend is down, it looks likely to last several more decades.

Anti-fracking protesters chant outside Balcombe, West Sussex

Environmental activists lock themselves together at the main entrance to the Cuadrilla exploratory drilling site in Balcombe during as anti fracking demonstrations in 2013

In 2000, East Anglia University's David Viner said within a few years winter snowfall would be 'a very rare and exciting event', and children 'just aren't going to know what snow is'. If you live in Derbyshire, a look at the snowscape outside your window would tell you this is not so.

Tropical storms are often said to be increasing. They may do in future. But they certainly haven't done yet: the trend is flat.

Last winter's UK storms may have dumped slightly more rain than they would have done 50 years ago, because a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture. But there is simply no evidence that the jet-stream storm track, the phenomenon that barrelled depression after depression towards us, has anything to do with global warming.

In America, the tendency to blame what was once called 'weather' on climate change is especially marked: the bitter 'polar vortex' experienced there in the 2014 winter, last week's no-show 'snowmageddon' in New York and California's (now terminated) drought have all been widely ascribed to it. The same went for Sandy, the storm and tidal surge that drenched New York and New Jersey in 2011. No one wanted to remember that two worse such surges took place in the 1930s, while the continental US is still in the longest hurricane drought (since Wilma in 2005) in recorded history.

But nuance and caution are not what politicians and green activists want, and they insist there is a fixed, known relationship between exact levels of carbon dioxide and future temperatures. Often they add we are perilously close to 'tipping points', when the present, modest warming – an average of 0.12C per decade since 1951 – will suddenly accelerate and become rampant, although the 2013 IPCC report offers little support to such claims.

But ultimately, where are they taking us? Citing climate change is certainly an effective way of making schoolchildren feel fearful and guilty, much as preachers once used to. Yet the 'solutions' orthodoxy advocates – an international, binding emissions treaty and further vast investment in renewables such as wind – haven't worked yet, and it won't work now.

Police officers escort a vehicle past anti fracking protesters at an exploratory 'Fracking' site at Balcombe

Vivienne Westwood joins fracking protesters in Balcombe

We're in a hole, but we keep digging, enacting unilateral measures in Britain and the rest of the EU which merely make our energy more expensive, and so export jobs to countries which produce higher emissions. The billions being poured by UK consumers into subsidising renewables have succeeded only in creating powerful vested interests, who cloak their greed with green verbiage.

If just a fraction of this money was spent on research into new forms of nuclear reactors, including fusion, where huge progress has been made in the past 20 years, the prospects of developing low carbon energy sources that might actually work would be much greater. In recent cold, still days this winter, windmills were producing just half a per cent of the UK's electricity.

You may not have known such a thing as the Commons Environmental Audit Committee exists. But it does, and last week it recommended a ban on fracking for shale gas in the UK. Natural gas is by far the cleanest fossil fuel. By switching from coal to fracked gas, America has seen huge falls in its emissions. According to the committee, however, fracking 'is incompatible with our climate change targets'.

Which is a shame, because the UK is sitting on vast reserves of a fuel that can end energy insecurity, and provide clean jobs and growth for decades. In the Commons last week, Bristol MP Charlotte Leslie voted in favour of fracking. Afterwards, in indelible red paint, her Bristol office was painted with the words 'fracking whore'.

There is one way the world really is getting hotter, very fast: in the temperature of the climate debate. The reason is simple: in November, there will be yet another vast UN conference, which will try, and fail, to get another legally binding treaty. The search will be futile, because however fierce the green pressure, India, China, Russia and, thanks to the Republican Congress, America, will not sign up to it.

Maybe after that, when the hatred has dissipated a little, the debate we should have started years ago can begin. Because, ultimately, it doesn't matter how hot we think the world might be in 2100: right now, the things greens and politicians are trying to do, cannot and will not work.

Although my children are told in school that views such as mine jeopardise their future, I'm reasonably confident that what I've written here won't induce them to kill me. Whether my online critics encourage them to do so once again, we will have to see.