Once again this morning, Boris Jobdone is holding forth unto the multitudes from his pulpit in the Latter Day Moron Church of the Teletubbies. Getting sweaty in December has convinced him that, Great Scott, something is going on you know.
‘Scientists look at the data,’ opines Borisconi, ‘But everyone else just looks at the weather – and it is the weather, therefore, that makes the psychological difference to the debate’.
Er, wrong. Scientists extrapolate from the data and suggest interpretations….about which they disagree until the day of their deaths. Everyone else looks at all kinds of things from temperature through to rainfall, and decides something has changed – but they’re sick and tired of fifty-five views on why it’s happened. As always, Doris is a tad loose on the cannonade front here, so I thought a little gentle criticism might be in order:
1. Weather and climate are not mutually exclusive, as the former is merely, over long periods of time, a symptom of the latter. To use the multi-tasking Mayor and MP’s favourite 17th century noun, separating the two is pure poppycock.
2. The long-range forecast for this Winter was based on a known potential climate change agent, El Nino, which also has an effect on the weather. Early mild winters are not unusual when Nino is active, but now the “scientists” are saying it will be “somewhat colder” in February and March. Go back to last June, and they had the entire European continent from Sweden to Brindisi under a dark blue belt of -5°C from October to April. So if they can get this part-climatic short term event so badly wrong, why on earth should we have any faith in their CO2 and greenhouse gases claptrap?
3. In that context, the idea that our planetary climate and effects upon it are ‘settled science’ is a bit like saying “even though we don’t know whether there was, is, or might be life on Mars, the Big Bang Theory is settled science”. Which of course is what scientists say, because it’s what scientists do: shoot off their mouths in learned journals, and then change their minds five years later.
4. I thought COP an supremely ironic name for the Paris Conference, because it is not going to be policed any any meaningful way at all. BoJo might indeed want to ponder on the ethics of his colleague the Prime Minister, who “hailed” the Paris jamboree, and then promptly snook a law in favour of fracking through Parliament 48 hours later.
We have to assume that the Turkish Viking does not himself think there’s much to worry about in the emissions data, because as Mayor of London he helped his corrupt and eventually unseated chum Tim Yesno to foist taxis upon London cabbies despite knowing their emissions were higher than the existing vehicles.
But to give His Mayorness due credit, he was very quick to spot a change of climate on the subject of Elm House in Tory-held Richmond; his success in silencing the squally weather over there must surely stand as a landmark in reversing political warming.
I do wish the Tubbytwins would give more space to people who can think. I myself, for example, am free at any time to write about Ten Pin Bowling, a subject about which I know almost nothing. That said, letting blinkered scientists who know everything loose on pols who know nothing is and always has been a much faster Road to Hell.
The Slog 