Wonderful, Wonderful, Copenhagen

I had very low expectations of the outcome of the Copenhagen conference on climate change, and even then, I was disappointed. Seeing the various squabbles and shenanigans, the cabals and the backroom deals, I think the best thing from now on for anyone who is worried about climate change is to buy a CNB suit and some really thick sunglasses.

What cracks me up, though, is that some people still deny it's happening. Of course, those remarkably dim boffins at UEA, artlessly discussing whether or not to fudge their data, have not helped matters, and I cannot but wonder that there is an untold story there about how that was hacked and released to the media, just on the eve of the conference starting.

I am not a scientist. I dropped physics like a red hot brick in the third year, despite, paradoxically, being quite interested in it now. So, I don't understand the data, I don't understand the graphs.

What I do see, though, is a tedious concentration on the single issue of temperature. Almost to the angels-on-pinheads stage. Is it getting warmer? Is it getting cooler? It's the warmest decade since etc etc etc.

Anyone with half a brain can see there's SOMETHING wrong with the weather. We never get hot summers any more, every winter we always get catastrophic floods, like those in Cockermouth and Workington, and in other parts of the world, eg Indonesia, it's much much worse. It's more extreme. It can't ALL be caused by Barrats and Wimpeys building yuppie-hutches on the flood plain.

As I sit here typing this, we are in the midst of the coldest snap in the UK for about 20 years, which has been gleefully seized on by media wits along the lines of "what price global warming now, then, hur hur!" God, how tediously short sighted these idiots are, not to recognize that it is all part of the massive disturbance of weather systems. I'd like them to spend a few weeks filling sandbags in Cumbria, they might buck their ideas up then.

Irrespective of whether it's warmer or not, SOMETHING is screwing up the weather and making it more EXTREME, so I would be grateful if all the learned boffins could kindly roll down the sleeves of their lab coats, stop arm wrestling about the temperature and shouting "Lower!" and "Higher!" at each other like they were at a screening of "The Price is Right" and actually work out what it is that is DISTURBING the weather systems.

You can drown in warm water or cold water, Even I, as a non-scientist, know that.