The sky is falling in again

Professor Anthony Costello of UCL's Institute for Global Health was on the BBC Today programme this morning putting the willies up people about the 'full blown climate crisis' that we shouldn't forget about in the midst of a full blown economic crisis or a full blown political crisis. Heaven forbid that we should, or professors at the Ministry of Fear, Climate Section would suffer a funding cut and that would mean less trips to the Himalayas to watch glaciers melt. Something they're perfectly capable of doing on their own and have done periodically, as far as we know, throughout time. The glaciers, that is.

Such alarmist talk is fuelled by the listing of any adverse or unusual climate event as unquestionable being caused by man's CO2 emissions. The question has to be asked - what behavior of the climate system would contradict models of global warming?

Could it be that it's just the weather? And that people die from bad weather because 2 billion of them are living on less than a dollar a day?

This morning, Professor Costello tried to give us a sweetener at the end of his fear sell. 'Moving to a low carbon lifestyle will have many health benefits,' he said. 'Less stress, less diabetes, less obesity and heart disease.'

Less stress indeed. These promises at the end of the rainbow sound like Mao's three years of struggle to bring in a thousand years of prosperity which was partly responsible for a body count of 80 millions.

It also reminds me of the promise that nuclear-generated electricity that would be 'too cheap to meter'. When the hidden agenda was about producing weaponised plutonium to bring the world further to the edge.

If there are less of the above health conditions, it may be because there are fewer people around. An 80% reduction in C02 emissions by 2050 is easily achievable in this context:

JONATHON PORRITT, one of Gordon Brown’s leading green advisers, is to warn that Britain must drastically reduce its population if it is to build a sustainable society.

I have a vision of someone like Porritt popping up on TV telling people to take only one breath in every two to reduce CO2 emissions.

Now it's time to call for calm and quote Churchill.

“When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened”