One degree

There are numerous ways of expressing the silliness of climate science, but to my mind the simplest is also the most obvious - the puny rise in global temperature - the one miserable degree centigrade we are supposed to run round in circles panicking about. One sodding degree!

Maybe slightly less than one degree, but who cares?

We spend our lives in climates - choose holiday locations because of the climate. We know climate. Everyone on the planet knows climate. Animals know climate. Plants know climate.

Nobody expects a dramatic shift in the weather when the temperature changes by one degree. Nobody goes looking round for shade and an iced drink to stave off a sudden attack of heatstroke. We see far greater changes between night and day, summer and winter, even north and south in the UK. The insignificance of one degree is data - data we gather ourselves. Dependable data too - which makes a change.

When a change of one degree strikes, we don’t run for cover or start buying mountains of tinned food. We don’t rush out and buy up all the factor 50 sunblock, new sunglasses and a range of lightweight clothing. We don’t click onto Rightmove and look for a house up north.

A change of one degree in a hundred years, even if real, merely shows how stable the climate has been.

Going fractionally deeper into the issue, there is the unlikelihood of measuring a temperature change of one degree over a century via numerous weather stations which were not sited with a view to measuring global temperatures anyway.

Then there is the unlikelihood of all those thermometers being accurate to a fraction of a degree and how they were calibrated against a reliable standard, not to mention if they were ever calibrated in the first place. Then we loop back to the puny 1 degree change we are all supposed to worry about.

Are they serious?

Unfortunately they still are – even now the swivel-eyed nutters are still serious. But their own data merely shows how stable the climate has been for a hundred years or more. That’s it – that’s all they discovered.

Climate stability.