Climate change

If you were deliberately trying to obtain a record high temperature reading an international airport would be a good place to take your thermometer. With huge concrete aprons and planes spewing out large quantities of hot air, airports have a microclimate of their own. That is one reason not to get excited by today's record July temperature of 98 degrees Fahrenheit (36.7 Celsius) measured at Heathrow. But there is another very good reason why the familiar clattering of broken weather records does little to reinforce the narrative of climate change. There are four countries in the UK, 12 months of the year and 4 main records to beat: hottest, coldest, wettest and driest.

Pluscarden Abbey, just outside Elgin in northeast Scotland, is one of the most beautiful places in Britain. But to those who have visited in winter over the years, it has also felt like one of the coldest. After the war, when Benedictine monks arrived to restore what was a medieval ruin they slept with no roof, let alone heating. Then came the paraffin burners, which gave the monks a choice between freezing and asphyxiation. Central heating arrived in 1980 (it’s needed, if your day starts with prayers at 4.30am) but it was used sparingly. But when I went to visit last month I found a miracle had happened. There is a biomass boiler – pictured, above – which means they can not only afford to heat the place, but actually make a profit in so doing.

In his latest encyclical Pope Francis will apparently describe global warming as a ‘major threat to life on the planet’. If the leaked reports are accurate, his Holiness is absolutely right. Here are some examples of the havoc ‘global warming’ has wrought in the past decade: Honduras:US-backed security forces implicated in the killing of more than 100 peasant farmers involved in disputes with palm-oil magnates. Kenya: Teenage boy shot in February this year while protesting against a ‘wind park’ in Nyandarua. Mt Elgon National Park, Uganda: According to a newspaper report, more than 50 locals killed by park rangers and 6,000 evicted to make space for a ‘carbon offset’ plantation.

One of the fundamental principles of English common law is that you are innocent until proven guilty. And rightly so, for imagine how unfair it would be if any old loon with an axe to grind had only to lodge a trumped-up complaint with the relevant authorities in order to have you punished for no reason whatsoever. Actually, though, this cruel and capricious system exists in Britain.

Martin Williams, former head of the government’s air quality science unit, has declared that the reason we have a problem with air pollution now is that ‘policy has been focused on climate change, and reducing CO2 emissions, to the exclusion of much else, for most of the past two decades. Diesel was seen as a good thing because it produces less CO2, so we gave people incentives to buy diesel cars.’ Yet another example of how the global warming obsession has been bad for the environment — like subsidising biofuels, which encourage cutting down rainforests; or windfarms, which kill eagles and spoil landscapes; or denying coal-fired electricity to Africa, where millions die each year from the effects of cooking over smoky wood fires. Greens are too hard on coal.

Damien Hirst, Grayson Perry, James Delingpole: all winners of major art prizes. I was awarded mine last week by Anglia Ruskin University (formerly Anglia Polytechnic) which I think is a bit like Cambridge (it’s in the same town), though bizarrely its excellence has yet to filter through to the official UK uni rankings, where it’s rated 115th out of a list of 123. Anyway, the point is, I won. Sort of. I ‘won’ this extremely important prize in the way that Michael Mann, the shifty climate scientist, has been known to claim he ‘won’ the Nobel prize when it was awarded to the IPCC. That is, the prize wasn’t handed to me personally but I did play my part. What happened was this.

Two headlines on successive days speak volumes about the scaremongering which is endemic in the way in which learned bodies disseminate information on climate science. Yesterday, the Royal Society published a report, Resilience to Extreme Weather, predicting that by 2090 four billion people around the world each year will be subjected to heatwave events, with dire consequences for the health of older people. This morning, the Office of National Statistics published its latest figures on ‘excess winter deaths’. They show that last winter there were 18,200 more deaths between December and February than would be expected during the three summer months. Dramatic though this sounds, it is the lowest recorded in 65 years.