As a child, I sat on a whale every day. Many years before I was born a 50-ton sperm whale had washed up on the Scottish coast near to where I grew up, and one of my relatives had cleverly fashioned a stool out of one of its enormous vertebrae. To a child, that bone-stool was a thing of wonder: a fraction of a creature of impossible vastness. I would scan the sea, imagining the great beast from which my seat had come, dreaming that another whale might one day burst the surface. It never did.

My whale (as I considered it) had been found on the beach in 1946. By coincidence, that was also the year 15 whaling countries signed up to a convention “recognising the interests of the nations of the world in safeguarding for future generations the great natural resources represented by the whale stocks”. Quite how far those stocks had been depleted was a matter of guesswork, but an estimated two million whales were killed in the 20th century alone. Right-thinking people agreed: continuing to destroy these beautiful, intelligent, ecologically important and seriously endangered mammals was not clever. The International Whaling Commission (IWC) banned commercial whaling in 1986.

The future of the whale should have been secure, yet today the whaling ban is closer to being overturned than at any time in the past 20 years, consensus on whaling is more distant than ever and many whale species remain on the brink of extinction. This week the IWC meets in Alaska with pro-whaling nations, led by Japan, determined to resume the hunt on a commercial scale.

The whaling debate was stranded and picked clean long ago. It is a rotten thing, riddled with bad science, exploited loopholes, petty politicking, bribery, blind nationalism and human greed, both gastronomic and economic. But perhaps more alarming still, the whaling debate bears disturbing parallels with the looming battle over climate change, another issue on which the clarity of science is being hopelessly clouded by politics and narrow self-interest. The world has had 60 years to protect the whale for all time; there is nowhere near that long to find a way to rebalance a warming world.

Japanese tactics in the whaling struggle have been ruthlessly cynical. Last year Japanese whalers killed 853 minke whales and 10 fin whales, and they will start hunting humpback whales this year. All were eaten, in the name of “scientific research” that most reputable biologists dismiss as a sham. Killing a whale for research is like building a coal-fired power station to examine greenhouse gases.

The claim that whales eat lots of fish and thus threaten stocks needed for human consumption has been comprehensively rubbished by scientists: whales and human tend to prey on different fish.

The Japanese campaign to resume whaling is more a matter of national pride than culinary taste. Indeed, whale meat is principally eaten by the older generation in Japan, who turned to it as a foodstuff during postwar shortages. Japan insists that whale meat is a national delicacy; in truth, its relationship to the Japanese palate is closer to our own lingering fondness for Spam; inexplicable to anyone under the age of 60.

Last year Japan gained a majority on the IWC by recruiting countries to the whaling cause in return for fisheries grants worth millions of dollars. Mongolia, for example, has proved a keen supporter of whaling, despite not having a coastline: Gobi Dick, sadly, has yet to be discovered.

The whalers would need a 75 per cent majority to overturn the ban, but with a single-vote advantage last year they managed to push through a resolution declaring that the moratorium on whale hunting was no longer necessary. In response, a British diplomatic campaign has rounded up six new member nations this year to vote against Japan and its allies. What once seemed a moral imperative has become a grubby game of vote-bargaining, which defenders of the whale must play.

Japan insists that whale populations have grown sufficiently to permit a resumption of hunting, but most marine ecologists disagree, pointing out that while some species may be slowly recovering, others are still perilously close to extinction. Whales are still dying from unnatural causes: errant fishing nets, human noise, pollution and continued hunting. No one knows quite how many are left. That is surely the best reason for not killing any more.

The pro-whaling lobby points out that Britain and the US played a big role in the slaughter, while opponents of whaling stand accused of “imperialism” for “imposing moral and ethical judgments that affect our rights to use resources”. The argument echoes that of the polluters in China and India, who insist that since the West caused the environmental damage that has led to global warming, we are in no position to lecture others.

No amount of dodgy science and diplomatic manoeuvring should disguise that whaling is as indefensible today as it was 60 years ago: the unspeakable in pursuit of what is, to most of the world’s population, uneatable. Whale-hunting is moribund, inhumane and uneconomic; whale-watching, on the other hand, is profitable, harmless and rapidly expanding.

Today the argument for tackling climate change may seem equally stark, but that too is being swamped by the accusations of nationalism, imperialism and influence-peddling. If we could not combine to defend this single symbolic organism during the past 60 years, what hope is there of finding a working consensus on global warming before it is too late?

Whale oil represented a huge global market in the 19th century, because it burned brightly, was relatively easy to harvest, cheap to process and supplied by nature in apparently endless quantities. The same was once said of oil.

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