We have also had some help from Mother Nature which, after a glorious early spring, has given us an indifferent summer and a distinctly cool August, with the Met office telling us that we've had the best of it.
For me, having spent the last year poring over records from 1940, I see an uncanny similarity between the current weather and that experienced then – when there was also an early, fine spring – lasting into June – but with a poor summer. It got so bad on 19 August that air warfare virtually ceased for a few days. Oddly, then as now, there was a heat wave in parts of North America (below right).
That year was also characterised by a glorious Indian summer, the London Blitz starting on 7 September in a blaze of sunshine as well as fire, with record temperatures. And what followed was a brutal winter, so cold at times that water froze out of the firemen's hoses, as they sought to quench the flames of Nazi brutality.
Then, of course, was the start of the "little cooling" – conditions which seem to be replicating themselves in the here and now. And, as a hint of what is to come, we see reports of heavy snow in New Zealand, following a polar blast whiuch has been characterised as "of the order of a 50-year event".
The level of snow that had fallen in Wellington has not been seen since at least the 1970s. In Wanganui in the North Island, snow had settled for the first time since 1974. Dunedin airport was closed, passengers were left stranded at Queenstown Airport and some flights were cancelled in and out of Christchurch Airport yesterday morning.
With such events, the global warming scare is getting less and less credible, although we are far from out of the woods yet. As Booker and I observed in our book "Scared to death", the most damaging effects of a scare come from the regulatory aftermath, when the politicians pass laws to deal with the supposed threats.
Interestingly though, if we are going through another "little cooling", the politicians should be mindful of the winter of 1947-8, when the brutal conditions brought British industry to a near-halt and precipitated an economic crisis from which the Labour government never really recovered.
The fool Cameron and his idiot friends, aided and abetted by the media, seem determined to replicate the economic conditions, and the time-frame is such that a repeat of the 1940s weather pattern would be enough to trigger massive power outages.
If Cameron is still around in seven years time, we will at least have the opportunity of telling him, "I told you so" – provided the mob has not already torn the man apart by then.
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