It’s noon here in our corner of Burgundy, and the temperature is 14C (that’s 57F to les anglo-saxons). It’s raining non-stop, as it has been for the past three weeks, with the thermometer never venturing out of the teens.
That’s colder and wetter than I’ve ever seen in this neck of the woods – colder and wetter than anyone has ever seen. Now if that’s not the evidence of global cooling, I don’t know what is.
A new Ice Age is upon us, and we’re all going the way of the dinosaurs. And need I remind you that it’s not global warming but global cooling that has caused the worst ecological disasters in history.
Unless we manage to escape to Africa, we’ll all freeze to death. Except me, that is. My wife has family in Kenya, and I’m going to ask her relations to investigate the property market in Nairobi…
What? What are you calling me? Well, you too, sunshine. What’s your problem, anyway?
That I’m confusing weather with climate? That these two concepts involve different timelines? That weather is what happens over days, weeks or seasons, while climate is measured over millennia? That the cold snap in Burgundy, France, no more testifies to global cooling than the heat wave in Palm Springs, California, testifies to global warming?
Fine, I stand corrected. Suitably cowed, I retreat into my shell, tail between my legs. Or maybe it’s not the tail – I’m no better at anatomy than at climatology.
But I’m reasonably good at logic. Hence I agree that, if cold weather in Burgundy is no proof of global cooling, then indeed hot weather in California is no proof of global warming. If A equals B, then B equals A – the logic seems unassailable.
Moreover, it doesn’t take an intellectual giant to wield this mental weapon. Back in the old country, that simple equation was taught to seven-year-olds – and I don’t recall anyone unable to grasp the concept. Yet it’s evidently beyond the meagre intellectual capacity of the university-educated grownups working for our media.
This morning, Sky News did a feature on the heat wave in California, where the temperature had hit 120F in Palm Springs and 130F in Death Valley (which is actually four degrees lower than the record set in 1913, when not many people used aerosols).
I watched the programme for about two minutes, which was as long as I could feel my sanity threatened only mildly. During that time the grateful public was regaled with two human-interest interviews, involving a housewife outside her bungalow and a hard-hatted chap on a building site.
They both acknowledged that it was worryingly hot, and the resultant fires nothing short of terrifying. “If it goes on like this,” said the hard hat, “nobody will be able to work”.
That wasn’t an unreasonable conclusion for someone engaged in manual work outdoors. An accountant crunching numbers in an airconditioned office may feel differently, but no such person was asked.
The interviewer then decided to give millions of viewers the benefit of his interviewees’ expertise in climatology. Was this calamity caused by global warming? But of course, what else, said the hard hat. The housewife just smiled ruefully. It went without saying.
If pressed, I’m sure these experts would have explained that, just as the heat was caused by global warming, global warming was caused by our rapacious use of hydrocarbons. As a result, copious amounts of CO2 are released and hey, presto, Al Gore is your uncle and also your aunt. We’re all going to burn.
The interviewer then explained helpfully that before long the residents of Palm Springs would have to move somewhere cooler. He then made a feeble attempt at humour by recommending Greenland as a desirable destination.
I know that the hatching of new pernicious orthodoxies is my recurrent theme. But it recurs precisely because each day brings new evidence of this orgy of fire-eating anomie.
No one seems to seek facts. It’s enough for the knee to jerk vigorously enough and in the right direction. And in this case the only right direction is towards scaremongering about climate change, accompanied by entreaties to impoverish all Western economies for the noble cause of saving ‘our planet’.
Never mind the facts, feel the passion. True enough, it’s hard to argue against passion. But it’s still possible to invoke the facts.
And these say that CO2 is a trace gas, contributing only one in 85,000 molecules to the atmosphere. And only three per cent of our CO2 is anthropogenic, making it a small trace of an infinitesimally tiny one.
Moreover, thanks to the belated industrialisation of China, anthropogenic CO2 emissions have grown 10 per cent in the past 25 years. However, world temperature practically hasn’t increased over the same period.
No evidence suggests that we are going through an unprecedented global warming. In fact, ‘our planet’ has been warmer than it is now for about 80 per cent of its existence. Serious scientists – as opposed to assorted shills of man-made apocalypse – identify numerous factors affecting climate, with CO2 playing a walk-on role, if indeed any at all.
Analysing climate properly is impossible without a thorough knowledge of every contributing factor. Solar activity, for example, accounts for some 95 per cent of such factors. Other disciplines essential to proper understanding are astronomy, geology, solar physics, astrophysics, palaeontology, tectonics, oceanography, geochemistry and volcanology – just tell me where to stop.
If that burly Californian builder isn’t, as one suspects, an expert in those subjects, then his opinion is no more valuable than that of an averagely intelligent cat. But our media don’t seek such outdated things as knowledge and truth.
They are slaves to this new piety, as they are to any other that reaches the status of an orthodoxy within five minutes of being hatched. Happy in their bondage, they are desperately trying to enslave us all too – and they must be congratulated on doing a good job.
P.S. Speaking of congratulations, today is 14 July, the national day of France. Now, I love both France and my French friends, but I’m not going to wish them a happy Bastille Day.
On this day in 1789, 300 thugs stormed France’s most celebrated prison, pushing the button for a revolution. The Bastille was the centrepiece of what they saw as the cruellest tyranny. Yet they found only seven prisoners held there, most of them doing time for murder.
That’s pretty thin for a cruel tyranny. In fact, the prison in our regional centre, Auxerre (p. 30,000), is currently holding 715 prisoners, and no one thinks that’s especially despotic.
So, with apologies to my French friends, I’m withholding my congratulations. It’s nothing personal – I don’t recognise any revolutionary holidays, including 4 July in the US, 7 November in Russia or 1 October in China. Turkeys don’t wish a happy Christmas to one another, do they?
Noooo! you can’t say that! All that 18th century carnage is justified because we now have iPhones, Steven Pinker told me so!
Well done, Mr Boot. Nail spotted, hammer raised, point driven home.
Well, I don’t know. And I doubt that anyone else really knows, either.
It seems to me that there could well be/are at least two ongoing processes and that there is no way to distinguish between them. 1. The normal sort of year-to-year temperature fluctuation that we should expect in the absence of global cooling or warming. 2. a gradual (or not quite so gradual) increase or decrease in the average global temperature attributable to changes in atmospheric gases that contribute to global temperature. Moreover, global temperature has not been historically constant; it may fluctuate for reasons unrelated to the composition of the atmosphere, e.g. the output of the sun.
In such a situation the responsible thing to do is to assume the worst and to act conservatively. Thus, we should behave as though global warming were true until it is proved untrue. Simple, actually, if unpalatable to many.
“we should behave as though global warming were true until it is proved untrue. Simple, actually, if unpalatable to many.”
Global warming a fact and has been so for the last 10,000 years [since the end of the Younger Dryas Event]. About 10 deg. C. or 13 deg. F.
Only at question is the extent to which the activities of mankind have exacerbated the warming process, if any.
Poor Burgundy! We’ve had a month of extreme heat in the Moscow area with temperatures well above 30 degrees C and poor things in British Columbia had hard times surviving under 48-49 degrees C for a fortnight.