Watching the U.S. election from afar, it has been instructive to see how the issue of global warming has collided with the economic crisis. Crudely, the question of Hillary Clinton versus Barack Obama could come down to whether you care more about gas prices than you do about the green agenda.

It is not clear that the Gores and Schwarzeneggers are winning the argument, now that tough choices must be made. But whoever becomes president, environmental sceptics will have a tougher time even getting a hearing to make their case than under the Bush administration.

The politics of climate change, then, are as finely balanced in America as they have been one-sided in Europe for many years. Yet help is at hand from across the Atlantic for those who doubt the “scientific consensus” enshrined by the true believers of the International Panel on Climate Change.

Nigel Lawson is, by any standards, a political and intellectual heavyweight. During the 1980s, he ran Margaret Thatcher’s treasury for six crucial years, during which he did more to cut and simplify taxes than any other chancellor of the exchequer before or since.

At 76, Lord Lawson (as he now is) has lost none of his caustic wit and analytical acumen. As an expert on energy and a member of the House of Lords economic committee, he became interested in — and increasingly scandalized by — the economics of climate change. Now he has written a book, “An Appeal to Reason,” which appears in America later this month.

The witty subtitle — “A Cool Look at Global Warming” — belies the fact that Lord Lawson is furious about what he sees as the shoddy, intellectually dishonest way in which the Western world has been persuaded to believe not only that man-made carbon emissions are causing global warming, but that the threat is so great that drastic measures must be taken to mitigate such emissions, rather than to adapt to the possible consequences of climate change.

In contrast to Al Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” Mr. Lawson sees this ideology as “a convenient religion” and likely to lead to “the greatest misuse of resources the world has ever known.”

Such views were never likely to endear even a distinguished and respected statesman to the liberal press, but it was still a shock for Mr. Lawson, hitherto a successful author, to find that for a long time not a single publisher would touch the book.

When it finally appeared last month, however, the response was not the silence that he (and so many publishers) had feared. Instead, there was an outpouring of support from many quarters, even from Left-wing papers such as the Guardian, and the book had to be reprinted immediately. Its success is partly due to its own merits — its eloquence and brevity — but mainly to the simple fact that most people have never heard the case against global warming at all.

So what has Mr. Lawson to say? He shows that if the science of climate change is uncertain, the economics is crazy and the morality perverse. Even if the worst case scenario postulated by the IPCC came to pass, it would only mean that our great-grandchildren in 100 years’ time would be 2.6 times as prosperous as we are today, instead of 2.7 times, while in the developing world they would be 8.5 times better off instead of 9.5 times. Far worse things would happen to humanity, especially its poorest members, if governments seriously tried to prevent carbon emissions altogether.

Mr. Lawson fears that growth rates would fall, globalization would go into reverse, and all in vain. For the only way to enforce this policy would be by a treaty binding on all. Yet it is certain that neither China nor India will sign such a treaty, in which case even a President Obama would find it politically impossible to do so either.

For those who feel stigmatized as “global warming deniers,” Mr. Lawson provides the facts and arguments they need. It is Senator Obama, Al Gore, and the rest who are in denial. The view that some Americans instinctively hold is that cheap energy is a blessing, not a curse, for mankind, and that it is irrational to mortgage the present for the sake of an uncertain future — a risk that is trivial compared to the threat of terrorists or rogue states getting their hands on nuclear weapons.

Even if global warming is occurring, even if it is caused by us, even if it is on a planetary scale, the right response is to do what human beings have always done: adapt.

Adaptation we know we are good at; trying to control the earth’s climate is sheer megalomania. Europeans maintain that global warming is entirely the fault of the Americans and that the poorer countries that supply goods to our markets should follow our example by renouncing fossil fuels, however destructive to their political and economic stability.

Their hypocrisy would be ludicrous if it weren’t infectious. Americans have a natural immunity to such hypocrisy, but they may find themselves subjected to a nauseating dose of it if an Obama presidency should come to pass. Maybe we should all give thanks for the subprime crisis: it may yet save America and the world from something worse.

Mr. Johnson is the editor of Standpoint.