Neil Hudson: Happy global warming

“You’re not still a sceptic, are you?” says my pal.

“Course I am,” I chime. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

So, there you are. This week’s column is going to be about ‘global warming’ and I am going to try and not come across as too angry.

The first thing to point out is that, contrary to popular belief, it’s quite hard to write opinion columns for the newspaper, because once you get past the gateposts of the issue in question, you quickly find yourself in the mud of the field beyond and what you thought was firm ground from a distance, turns out in fact to be just a quagmire - a word I have been longing (as much as one can ‘long’ about a word) to use for some time.

The thing about global warming, or climate change, or whatever you want to call it, is that nowadays it’s pretty much taken as read. Newscasters on TV refer to it as though the case has already been proven. No doubt, schoolchildren across the Western world have it drilled into them on a daily basis, too.

Lately, global warmists have been up in arms, owing to the recent heat wave, which many take as evidence after the fact, when all it is is weather.

Even the Met Office, that doyen of predictability and which is the metaphorical equivalent of having a fortune teller stand next to a Vegas roulette wheel, has struck out by declaring last year was (cue Hollywood voice over guy) “...the hottest since records began.”

Even though records began only in 1910.

So, despite the earth being around for billions of years and humans having existed for a mere fraction of that, our weather records (official ones at least) represent just a fraction of that. A fraction of a fraction. Using this thinnest of slivers of knowledge, scientists attempt to find meaning.

But the data itself is flawed and subject to all kinds of manipulation: vast areas of the planet have no temperature monitoring whatsoever and so scientists make a guess based on other temperature readings. What am I basing all this conjecture on, you ask? Why, the same thing the global warmists are: hearsay.

‘But coral reefs are disappearing!’ moan the alarmists. ‘Islands are disappearing under the sea!’

They always did. Up and until the events in the film The Day After Tomorrow become real, you’re not going to sway me. There, that wasn’t too angry was it?