The real cause, gnostically grasped, of Britain’s cold spell

The English are suffering through cold weather, down in the low teens in Manchester, but, as Daniel Hannan writes in The Telegraph:

George Monbiot: This cold weather is caused by—you guessed it—global warming!

Apparently, Britain is in a sort of wintry salient, squeezed between two hotter areas. It’s all to do with sea ice reflecting the sun. You can read the full argument here.

For all I know, Monbiot may be right. It just seems remarkably convenient that any climatic trend is the fault of greenhouse gases . Getting hotter? Global warming! Getting cooler? Global warming! Average overcast October day? Gaea is on her last legs!

Although I am sceptical of some of the political schemes put forward in the name of the Rio-Kyoto-Copenhagen-Cancun agenda, I have so far refrained from entering into a debate about the meteorology, being acutely aware that I have no scientific qualification. But I’m starting to realise that this doesn’t inhibit anyone else; possibly because, for partisans on both sides, it was never about the science in the first place.

With that last line, Hannan spoils his brief article and reveals himself as your typical anti-intellectual centrist who smugly places himself above both sides of an argument. It seems to be beyond Hannon’s comprehension that if the Global Warming ideologues have been wrong, then their critics have been right.

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December 22

Lydia McGrew writes:

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but global warming believers use the statement that there is a “big difference between climate and weather” as a kind of knowledgeable-sounding mantra to ward off disconfirmation of their theory by evidence. (This is the same evidence that, had it gone a different way, they would have eagerly claimed as confirmation of their theory.) By so doing, they are creating a secular version of the doctrine of transubstantiation. “Weather” is like the visible accidents of the planet. “Weather” can have any characteristics at all, including our going into a miniature Ice Age, and these visible accidents cannot disconfirm their religious belief that the true substance or essence of the planet, labeled “climate,” is warming.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 21, 2010 08:59 AM | Send