Global warming

How can we stop weather hyperbole? I am so staggeringly bored of waking up each morning to headlines which insist we’re all going to be killed – on the roads, or through freezing to death, or in a flood. There have been four weather hyperboles already so far this year; warmest January, or warmest day in January ever, wettest February, coldest March. There are so many criteria for awarding a hyperbole sticker that almost every day of the year could qualify. So, snow in March? An unheard of experience? Nope, it happens every other year, more or less – and that’s in the south of the country. Last year at this time we were just entering a very mild and rather pleasant phase – warmest April on record! Global warming! We’re all going to die!

This morning the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) told us that the climate summit in Durban, which concluded over the weekend, has been ‘heralded a success’. As they say, the ‘talks resulted in a decision to adopt the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol next year in return for a roadmap to a global legal agreement covering all parties for the first time’. Should anyone be heralding that as some kind of step forward? Was I wrong to be sceptical last week? As it happens, the various parties were actually trying to secure that ‘global legal agreement’, covering all of them, two years ago in Copenhagen — not just talking about securing it in the future.

This week's Spectator cover star Nils-Axel Mörner brings some good news to a world otherwise mired in misery: sea levels are not rising dangerously – and haven't been for at least 300 years. To many readers this may come as a surprise. After all, are not rising sea levels – caused, we are given to understand, by melting glaciers and shrinking polar ice – one of the main planks of the IPCC's argument that we need to act now to 'combat climate change'? But where the IPCC's sea level figures are based on computer 'projections', questionable measurements and arbitrary adjustments, Mörner's are based on extensive field observations.

We had a sell-out debate on global warming at The Spectator on Tuesday and, as I found out this morning, the debate is still going on. The teams were led by Nigel Lawson and Sir David King, and I was in the audience. I tweeted my praise of Simon Singh’s argument as he made it: it was a brilliant variation on the theme of "don’t think – trust the experts". He seems to have discovered the tweet this morning, and responded with a volley of five questions for me. Then David Aaronovitch weighed in, followed by Simon Mayo. At 8.35am! I had the choice between replying, or carrying on with my gourmet porridge. I chose the latter, and promised to blog my response later on to Simon Mayo and the Breakfast Crew. So here goes.

It’s jolly nice to be proved right about everything The most important, and comforting, thing to emerge from all that Wiki-Leaks business was that, by and large, we were right. All the things we suspected, or knew either instinctively or through common sense, were proved to be correct. Prince Andrew — arrogant, rude and with the IQ of a corgi? Yep. The oil company Shell effectively runs Nigeria? Sure thing. Gulf state Arab leaders are a tad duplicitous? No kidding, bub. It is always uplifting to discover that you were right all along, and that, in secret at least, the establishment agrees with you.

With the latest round of international climate change negotiations at Cancun less than a week away, Policy Exchange has published research showing that the UK’s and EU’s performance in reducing carbon emissions is not quite what it seems.   According to the official measure, used to determine performance against the Kyoto agreement, the UK’s emissions have fallen.  The UK is set to exceed its Kyoto target of 12.5 percent reduction from 1990 levels.  But, in our new report Carbon Omissions, Policy Exchange has estimated that total UK carbon consumption emissions in fact rose by 30 percent between 1990 and 2006.

Eureka, the science magazine from The Times, is in many ways a brilliant accomplishment. Advertising is following readers in an online migration - but James Harding, the editor, personally persuaded advertisers that a new magazine, in a newspaper, devoted to science would work. And here it is: giving the New Scientist a run for its money every month. That's why it's such a shame that today's magazine opens on an anti-scientific piece denouncing those who disagree with the climate consensus. My former colleague Ben Webster, now the paper's environment correspondent, is an energetic and original journalist - so it's depressing to see his skills deployed in a game of hunt-the-heretic.

Perhaps the most sinister side of the environmentalist movement is the idea of an “optimal population,” where human life is seen as a menace. The Optimal Population Trust has today said that there are 45 million too many people living in Britain – which, for a country of 60 million, is quite some statement. The peculiar thing is that this “problem” may well have a solution in the form of the human race failing to reproduce. The hands of the world population clock are slowing. The natural population replacement level, 2.1 kids per woman, is achieved by no European country (pdf here). England stands at a respectable 1.75, Scotland at 1.6 and Italy at a dismal 1.2.