A NEGLECTED anniversary: 2026, by my reckoning, is 40 years since the birth of the global warming scare.
It’s true that global warming was invented in the early 1980s, a pet discovery of environmental activists. But it was 1986 when green campaigners really caught on to the prospect of a world-ending threat to rival Aids, which was considered at the time to be about to kill us all. It began to attract attention from major newspapers and TV companies. The following year BBC reporters were measuring the rapid sinking of tropical islands.
By 1990 we had world climate conferences and large-scale spending by governments on climate research, conducted by scientists who never found reasons to doubt the global warming idea. Global warming – and it was warming, no messing about with ‘climate change’ – became the established orthodoxy.
There were standouts. I remember talking in 1990 to a deeply sceptical Sir Richard Doll, who didn’t think global warming was up to much in terms of science. Doll was the man who in the 1950s found smoking was linked to lung cancer. But no one who counted was listening. We were definitely all going to fry.
So how has it been going?
At the beginning of this year the Met Office reported that 2025 was the warmest year on record in Britain. It was 0.06C degrees warmer than the previous record year, 2022. However, since four out of five Met Office measuring stations are unreliable to within two degrees, there are some cussed deniers who find this implausible. Some of them even seem to think that in reality it’s getting colder.
What about the effect on the actual weather?
In December the Met Office warned that the outlook for Scottish ski resorts was ‘concerning’. Alex Priestley of the Met Office told the BBC: ‘With temperatures going up and up, the cold extremes are going to be less cold and the warm extremes are going to be warmer.
‘Unfortunately, for those of us who love snow we’re going to see a lot less of it. There will probably be winters by the 2080s or so when we see none at all, even in the Scottish mountains.’
Then there’s the clear-eyed Dale Vince, green energy tycoon and major donor to the Labour Party. Mr Vince posted on X on December 23: ‘If you’re dreaming of a White Christmas – dream on.
‘Snow is fast becoming a thing of the past in Britain. The fact that it’s hard wired into our culture through massive events like xmas and into our memories – is really interesting. Because it’ll be harder and harder to ignore the fact we don’t get snow anymore, and the reason why – climate change. Obvs.’
These assertions might now be regarded as premature, since Scotland has been knee-deep in snow since soon after New Year, and there has been plenty to go round in England.
Of course, these days we know better than simple global warming, Since the planet has heated insufficiently fast for the green lobby, it’s now extreme weather we must fear.
So when Storm Goretti approached, there were apocalyptic warnings of the terror to come. Simon King of the BBC said: ‘This sort of warning is only issued in the most extreme circumstances.’
In the event some trees came down in Cornwall and the Channel Islands. An unfortunate individual was killed by one. A number of homes were left without power. But ‘the most extreme circumstances’? Not really.
This week milder weather is forecast. We will surely be told by the BBC and others that temperatures are above average and therefore sinister.
It is time to wonder how long major broadcasters, academic institutions and governments can cling to the climate change idea. Pretty much everything that has ever been claimed about it has been wrong. In four decades of supposedly accelerating climate change, the world hasn’t baked, ice caps haven’t melted and nor have glaciers, the sea hasn’t risen, islands haven’t sunk, crops haven’t withered, storms and hurricanes haven’t become more frequent or more intense, and neither have forest fires. New deserts have failed to appear. There are no more floods than there always have been. All that lovely coral in the sea off Australia is still there.
And as I write it’s snowing outside.
