Gravesend is typically among the warmest towns in Britain, but even here it’s been a chilly week. Still, I suppose I shouldn’t grumble. It could be worse.
After all, according to experts in the US, I should have been struggling through six feet of snow.
I know this thanks to a reader, who this week emailed me a news story that the Observer published all the way back in February 2004. The newspaper boasted that, in a major exclusive, it had obtained a secret report from the Pentagon about the terrifying threat posed by climate change. And, at the time, it must have made for sobering reading. Because, according to this secret Pentagon report, Britain would be “plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020”.
Well, it’s now 2022. The lowest temperature recorded in Britain on Thursday was 19.4F (-7C). Which is certainly nippy. But on the same day, the temperature in Oymyakon, Siberia was -61.6F (-52C). So, although the school run may have been a touch on the bracing side this week, I think it might be a little melodramatic to call it Siberian.
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The report’s other forecasts weren’t much more successful. Apparently, between 2010 and 2020 Europe as a whole should have suffered an average annual drop in temperature of 6F. By the end of that decade, “catastrophic” shortages of water and energy were expected to “plunge the planet into war”. Still, I suppose the “nuclear conflicts, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting” would at least have taken our minds off the cold.
Even the short-term forecasts were alarming. By 2007, claimed the report, “violent storms” would render “large parts of the Netherlands uninhabitable”, with “cities like the Hague… abandoned”. Thankfully, the Hague managed to avoid this fate. Indeed, since the Observer’s scoop was published, its population has increased by around 100,000 people.
I’m not suggesting that climate change isn’t real, or that governments should do nothing to tackle it. Whenever green activists issue dire warnings about the future, however, it can be comforting to recall the dire warnings of the past.
America’s climate alarmists have been made to look like fools