...The weather of the past few weeks would have been unexceptional in the early 1980s. Today it is being cited as definitive proof that manmade climate change can't be happening. There's a splendid example of such blithering idiocy here: Gerald Warner, writing in the Telegraph, contends that the cold snap lends more support to the idea of a new ice age than to global warming theory. Were he to apply this reasoning consistently, he would have to write another blog on Sunday showing that, due to the unseasonably warm temperatures the Met Office forecasts for the UK this weekend, global warming is definitely happening. And the following week, if there's another cold snap, he should predict a new ice age again.


Faced with a choice between global temperature records covering more than a century, or three weeks of cooling in one small corner of the planet, Mr Warner chooses the second dataset to identify long-running global trends. Though he has evidently never read or never understood a peer-reviewed paper on this subject in his entire life, he then goes on to dismiss this whole canon of science as nonsense. Is there any other subject on which journalists can make such magnificent idiots of themselves and still keep their jobs?