For three years running, the met office have been forecasting warmer than average summers. The last two have been wet and miserable and despite the current forecast, this summer so far has seen snow on the Pennines in Scotland. Twice this week, we have had the central heating on, it has been so cold.That has not stopped The Sunday Times publishing a puff for the Met Office on its front page, with the forecast for 2080. The Met Office is predicting Mediterranean-style summers for Devon, a steamy 41°C in London and the southeast, followed by winter storms and floods in northeastern towns such as Hull.
With that sort of garbage polluting the media, it is not surprising that Booker's main piece today is headed "Global warming and a tale of two planets".
For openers, he takes on board the absurd claim by Kofi Annan Ihe of oil for food fame), who would have it that global warming is already "killing 300,000 people a year," noting that the situation looks a little different in the real world.
Global warming, therefore, has become "the tale of two planets". On one planet live all the Great and Good who have recently been trying to whip up an ever greater panic over global warming, as the clock ticks down to next December's UN conference in Copenhagen when they plan a new treaty to follow the Kyoto Protocol of 1997.
On the other planet, where the rest of us live, all the accepted measures of global temperatures show that their trend has been downwards since 2002, declining at a rate that averages to about 0.25 degree per decade.
Yet such a fall was predicted by none of those 25 computer models on which the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the rest of the Great and the Good rely for their theory of runaway global warming. Their computers are programmed to assume that as CO2 goes up, temperatures inevitably follow.
And, despite the ready flow of propaganda to the contrary, the Arctic ice has failed to disappear – in fact, it is not far off its 30-year mean. Al Gore's polar bears have failed to drown.
With just a hint of irony, Booker thus notes that "our own wonderfully sensible and honest MPs" have already passed the Climate Change Act, committing us to restrict our CO2 emissions within 40 years to a level only 20 per cent of where they were in 1990." And, of course, Obama has committed the US to the same.
Since these targets could only be met by closing down our economies, observes Booker, it is hard to know where we will find the money to pay the rest of the world what it is demanding. The real question we must decide in the years ahead is which of these two planets we are actually living on.
Sadly though, as far as the politicians go, we already know the answer.
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