It's a beautiful day outside; clear blue sky, scarcely the whisper of a breeze, temperature hovering around a gently cossetting 20C, greenfinch wheezing away nearby. This is good news for me because as soon as I finish this article I intend to spend the rest of the day under the horse chestnut tree with a pitcher of neat alcohol. But it is also good news for Britain and the rest of the world.
Last Thursday we were all frightened out of our wits by a new report from the Met Office about what life in Britain would be like in 2080: scorching African sun, all the crops dying, plagues of locusts and mosquitos. Cows collapsing in the fields because they had not worn enough Factor 30; half of Yorkshire and Norfolk washed away by the sea, middle England flooded by swollen rivers, Essex a lifeless arid desert (no change there, then); impeccably well-mannered middle-class people on their knees sucking the last molecules of moisture from dusty, exhausted standpipes in Notting Hill; famine, pestilence and death flapping its wings over our heads like a big black bat, cackling to itself.
This was the UK Climate Projections 2009, as envisaged by the Met Office and presented by a dutifully grave Hilary Benn, who insisted that we all had a responsibility to do something, anything, to stave off this apocalypse. So I did. I checked out the Met Office forecast for my village for the next 48 hours. Cloudy, it said. Bit of rain. Temperature of 17C, wind gusting at a remarkably precise 31mph, it said.
Short of predicting 6ft snowdrifts, ball lightning and gallons of newts falling from the sky, how much more wrong could it be?
And if it is that wrong over a forecast for the next 48 hours, how much faith should we have when it tells us, with a sort of smug and overweening confidence, what's going to happen in 70 years' time? How about none whatsoever?
Something terrible has happened to our weathermen since that evening in October 1987 when Michael Fish, with a patronising smirk, assured us we need not worry our silly heads about any of this hurricane nonsense - about five hours before Britain was flattened.
I think it is a case of Met Office overcompensation. These days they have hair-trigger reactions and are given to biblical pronouncements. Last weekend, for example, we were assured that by Monday we would all be drowned, with vast swathes of the country submerged by floods. It did not happen, anywhere. Thank the Lord the Met Office wasn't around in Noah's day with its comprehensive five-day forecast for the Ararat region or that dove would never have been released.
On our last bank holiday it warned people that we were in for a weekend of misery - but the weather was lovely, provoking Bournemouth to complain that it had been deprived of vast amounts of tourist money by this baleful forecast. When eventually they become convinced that the weather really is going to be nice and warm, they start up with those miserable don't-go-outside-you'll-die-of-cancer warnings.
It is not allowable to dispute the 2009 UK Climate Projections because if you do you will be what the eco-monkeys and the journalists, especially BBC journalists, call a "climate-change denier", which is almost as bad as being a Holocaust denier, except without the Jewish angle.
In other words, "climate-change deniers" are not people who query some of the science and indeed the hysteria of the eco-lobby, but a form of human filth who dispute proven, historical fact. The description "climate-change denier" is used more and more frequently and spat out with almost the same venom as are the descriptions "racist" and "Israeli".
So let's just be thankful that we aren't going to be around in 2080, not us nor our children's children. My mother-in-law is a born again end-time Christian who has been told by Jesus Christ that the world is going to end in the late autumn of 2017. She is a bit sketchy on the evidence for this, but she knew it was going to be sunny today.
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Quote from article: "And if it is that wrong over a forecast for the next 48 hours, how much faith should we have when it tells us, with a sort of smug and overweening confidence, what's going to happen in 70 years' time? How about none whatsoever?"
It's a common mistake that journalists and the public make in assuming that because weather forecasts can be wrong for just 48 hours in advance, it must be impossible to make good forecasts for the next several months or even years. Meteorological forecasts use very different methods from climatological forecasts. Because meteorological forecasts have to take into account much more dynamic, short-term factors governed by the short dynamical timescale of the atmosphere, it is understandable why some weather forecasts turn out to be wrong (however these days it is far less wrong than right, at least in my part of the world -- unfortunately people tend to forget all the accurate forecasts and only ever remember the wrong ones, which is human nature I suppose). However climate forecasts CAN be quite accurate if computer models are not over-relied upon. For instance the understanding of the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is now so great that El Nino events can now be accurately forecast many months in advance with startling accuracy (and more accurately than weather can be forecast for the next couple of days). This is because the underlying physics which govern ENSO (i.e. the wave mechanics of the Kelvin and Rosby Waves) is quite well understood. Also decade-long forecasts can be very accurate, especially in terms of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation which is a 30-year cycle and most likely played a large part in the warming of the 80s and 90s. We've just entered the cool phase of the oscillation, which means the next 25 years or so are likely to be cooler than the 100-year mean. This forecast, even though it stretches two or more decades into the future, can be trusted more than the weather forecast for the next 48 hours in your part of the world, because it is based upon less changeable ocean dynamics. Less erratic dynamics = easier forecasts, irrespective of the time frame involved.