Oh, goodness-there are news reports that we are threatened not by global warming but by a new ice age. Global cooling? Already, as Christopher Booker writes, a cadre of cooling activists is beginning to emerge:
But hang on a moment. Aren’t these new climate scaremongers the very same people who only a few years back were telling us that the planet was in danger of being fried to a crisp by runaway global warming?
And wasn’t it on their say so that the world’s politicians, led by our own here in Britain, were committing us to spending hundreds of billions of pounds to save the planet from the catastrophic warming caused by those same evil power stations?
The question this extraordinary turn of events raises is whether any of these supposed experts actually have the faintest idea what they are talking about.
But perhaps the most bizarre thing about this latest twist in the ongoing climate scare story is the way it takes us precisely back to where it all started 40 years ago.
All of us today have become so accustomed to the notion of global warming that it is hard to believe that in the Seventies, U.S. scientists began to warn us the world
These people may change their minds about the climate threat, but there is a constant: they want you to spend your money to counteract it. Hot or cold, the demands are pretty much the same: draconian plans such as the Kyoto Protocol to cut CO2 emissions, with a profoundly negative impact on the global economy, inevitably will be advocated by the climate crowd.
Believe me, I don’t want to sizzle or freeze with big woolly mammoths in a new Ice Age. I’m not one of those people unwilling to entertain the notion that mankind contributes to climage change and that certain preventative actions might be a good idea. But I suggest that, when it comes to funding, politicians give climate activists a cold shoulder until the science is better established.
We need to be able to speak cooly of this hot topic.