After the indifferent weather over the last week – and with more unseasonably good weather forecast for the end of this week - it seemed to me like a good time to raise the issue of so called 'Global warming' - or 'Climate change' as it's called when the weather's not as good (although this is a quite ridiculous phrase, as the climate changes all the time, it always has done and always will do).

Global warming is the doomster's favourite subject these days and a veritable industry has sprung up on the back of it, with governments and local authorities - amongst many, many others - quick to jump on the bandwagon once they realised that there was big money to be made, as they could get away with ever increasing taxes in the name of "being more green". Indeed, everyone’s favourite newspaper, the Newsshopper, has an extensive green section both in the paper and on the website with such dubious delights as Green Directory, Green Awards and Green Giveaways!


However, is this just a huge con? The hard-line doomsters would say not - probably calling for me to sacrificially slain for daring to question them - but then reason was never the forte of these people. They have an intolerance of dissent or reasoned debate that borders on madness and operate the most oppressive and intolerant form of political correctness around today, even though the vast majority of them have no specialist knowledge to contribute on the subject – ‘an inconvenient truth’ that Al Gore spectacularly fails to mention.

The media, of course, love scare stories and so have jumped on the bandwagon, adding to the hype. This is the greatest scare story of them all – the threat to the planet and the media will inevitably attempt to make the most of it in an attempt to attract new readers.

More worrying, however, is the fact that otherwise sensible people are being duped / shocked into believing that catastrophic global warming is occurring by the apocalyptic hyperbole that the doomsters are employing on the subject. And therein lies the problem - as the science is extremely obscure, they cannot readily be proved wrong.

However.....................if we look closely at the facts, the doomsters argument starts to flounder. In any one year, most CO2 production is not related to human beings. In fact less than 5% of the carbon moving through the atmosphere stems directly from human sources - and this is mainly from burning fossil fuels and deforestation. The vast majority of carbon flowing through the atmosphere has natural sources.

A warming trend began about 400 years ago, during the Little Ice Age, and this has continued. Ground based temperature stations indicate that the planet has warmed between 0.3 and 0.6 degrees centigrade since about 1850, with about half of this warming occurring since World War II. Against that, temperatures taken from weather balloons and satellites over the last 20years show a cooling trend.

Similarly ambiguous is the indirect evidence from rainfall, glaciers, sea levels and weather variability - for example, in the 1970s, after two decades of unusually cold weather, there was a scare about global cooling, with many eminent scientists warning us that we were facing a new ice age – and disaster.

Earth temperatures today are probably at about their 3000 year average. We have known periods of warming before - the Dark Ages and the Medieval Period (about 850 to 1350) for example saw quite a sharp increase in temperature of 2.5 degrees centigrade. Although there was some costal flooding, there was also improvement in agricultural productivity, trade and life expectancy. It was when the climate cooled again that agriculture failed and diseases spread.

So, the next time you see someone spouting some apocalyptic hyperbole about 'global warming' or 'climate change', take it all with a pinch of salt. Mother Nature is only doing what she's always done since earth was created.

Ask yourself this – is this so called global warming being unnecessarily hyped up by those who wish to manage our day to day lives, those who wish for a new licence to intrude and interfere in our everyday lives and to regulate us in everything we do? After all, no one would dare argue with the great cause of saving the planet from the alleged horrors of global warming...........would they?