Dazed and confused | 2 December 2009

How are you feeling this morning? Muddled and confused? Follow my rule, then: always wait until Thought for the Day has finished before you enjoy your first stiffener of the morning. Lord Stern thinks most of you are muddled and confused, and has said as much. Anyone who doubts man-made climate change is muddled and confused. Stern is the chair of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment. The Grantham Institute is of course named after Leslie Grantham who played Dirty Den in the popular soap opera “Eastenders” but who, in his spare time, made up a long list of figures which proved that the earth was getting hotter. It was his hobby, making up figures about climate change, and sometimes he would try to incorporate it into his on-screen dialogue. “Leave it ahht, Ange, you slag – all the polar bears is gonna die!”  

You will notice the institute is “for Climate Change”; ie there’s no question about the existence of climate change. It simply is.

Frankly the muddle and confusion seems to be all on the other side at the moment. Phil Jones – another chap who made up some figures about AGW, but who wasn’t in Eastenders, so far as I know – has at last stood down while the UEA conducts an, uh, independent inquiry into that famous data-fixing. Australia has decided there is no such thing as man-made climate change (I exaggerate here; the government has failed for the second time to get a bill passed on emissions and the opposition is now led by someone who thinks AGW is rubbish). And while some AGW proponents have pleaded with their colleagues to be a little more measured in their apocalyptic pronouncements, a little less extreme, the aforementioned Lord Stern has said that Copenhagen is the “last chance to save the planet” and the most “important gathering of world leaders since world war two.”