Our national broadcaster is going ballistic at the climate lark.

Last night, RTE started a series of programmes, all red in the face with excitement at the catastrophe that is on our doorsteps [or maybe on our sea shores?]. I didn’t bother watching as they had already devoted a fair chunk of the news to the subject.

There was something I noticed about that news item. They told us such facts that the warmest ten years on record had occurred in the recent past, or some such. In fact the entire report kept referring to “since records began”, or “record breaking” without saying when records actually began. One piece was a Greenlander telling us of tales his grandfather used to tell him about glaciers for fucks sake.

So when did records begin?

This is an important point as everything has to be taken in context. As far as I can discover, temperature records only started about three hundred years ago at the very earliest, and how reliable are they? Reliable records probably don’t go back much further than two centuries. Now two hundred years is not a very long time, considering that humans have wandered around for the last thirty five thousand years or so.

So the climate is changing. Quelle surprise! it has always changed, but comparing modern climate with evidence garnered from a mere couple of centuries gives a very distorted view. I could equally claim that today is the coldest day for the last eight months but that proves nothing but sounds alarming.

So assuming temperatures are rising, how can they possibly tell what’s around the corner? Maybe temperatures will plummet again [as some experts are predicting as we head towards a solar minimum]? If the feckers can’t predict the weather beyond five days, how can they predict climate in the next thirty or forty years?

If they are really that worried about the climate, then I suggest they just tweak a few figures in their computer models.

Problem solved.