THE other week, I wrote in TCW that the Met Office was organising a get-together of climate zealots in London to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1976 heatwave. It promised a ‘new analysis’ of the event and a weather forecast for 2056.
Shameless cynic that I am, I wrote of these cultists: ‘With most of their livelihoods dependent on sustaining the myth of man-made global warming, it’s not hard to guess what that future weather forecast will be.’
The conference duly took place this week. And lo, my prediction turned out to be commendably accurate. Ed Hawkins, professor of climate science at the University of Reading, claimed that in 2056 we could ‘plausibly’ be sizzling in 45C (113F) heat.
The culprit? No prizes for guessing. Professor Hayley Fowler, of Newcastle University, intoned: ‘We are showing the public that these impacts will become part of normal life in the coming decades if we don’t rapidly reduce fossil fuel emissions . . .’
Professor Paul Behrens, from the University of Oxford, made our flesh creep even further by pronouncing: ‘British families will struggle to put food on the table as heatwaves escalate over the coming decades and cause multiple harvest failures in the UK and around the world.’
So there you have it – same old, same old. The science is declared to be settled, with no hope of any alternative view being given a proper airing. And thus the funding is secure to keep the climate change community in well-paid jobs. It seems that whatever your area of study, you have only to add the words ‘global warming’ to it to be awarded a grant.
Meanwhile, outside the conference venue – presumably to the delight of delegates – the thermometer was climbing to around 30C (86F). And pundits were forecasting that the June record temperature of 35.6C (96.08F), set in 1976, would soon be broken.
The media were whipping up their usual frenzy. The Daily Mail website declared that the UK was bracing for its ‘hottest day ever’. Oh, really? Would that be hotter than the 2,300C (3,680°F) the planet experienced 4.5billion years ago? If so, we’d all be well advised to start slapping on the Factor 50.
The climate stitch-up is all very depressing for simpletons like me, who’ve been around long enough to know that heat in summer and cold in winter are not that unusual. And who know that long before Man was around, the Earth has boiled and frozen many times. Unfortunately, the climate industry is too firmly embedded and too lucrative for there to be any chance of it being debunked any time soon. Even if mile-high glaciers start creeping down from the Arctic again, they’ll still be telling us it’s caused by man-made global warming.
To paraphrase Nineteen Eighty-Four, if you want a vision of the future, imagine Ed Miliband, Greta Thunberg, the Met Office, the BBC, the IPCC and a horde of other such grifters stamping on a climate sceptic’s face – for ever.
