What the AirCon Debate Says About Britain's Climate Insanity
Every summer, like clockwork, Britain has the same conversation. The temperature creeps above 28 degrees, the country grinds to a halt, and the media bombards the public with hysteria about the “hottest summer since records began” and fear-mongering about the future:
Naturally, this summer being actually unusually warm, a new level of insanity has been reached with a debate about the need to prevent people from using air conditioning. Some councils have gone so far as to force residents to remove air conditioning they’d installed.
The standard attack line against anyone attempting to introduce sanity into this debate is that they are a climate “denier”. To be very clear, I do not “deny” the climate, whatever that means. Nor do I deny that in recent decades, average global temperatures have increased and look set to continue. And, while I am skeptical about the predictive power of climate modelling, for the sake of argument, I am perfectly happy to accept that human activity is a significant contributor to the changing climate. I am, in other words, a “climate accepter”.
But there are a number of things I refuse to accept because they are dangerous, irresponsible, counterproductive lies.
First, I believe we must look at current world temperatures in the right context. You’ve no doubt seen some version of this graph which shows just how terrified you must be:
What you probably have never seen is a graph of average temperatures over a far more meaningful period, for example 1 billion years:
Do current temperatures look unprecedented to you?
Zooming in, here are average July temperatures in the British Isles since the emergence of Homo Sapiens 300,000 years ago:
For roughly 280,000 of our 300,000 years on earth, Britain was either under an ice sheet or barely habitable tundra. The last interglacial — around 125,000 years ago — was warmer than today. We know this because we had hippopotamuses frolicking in the Thames and elephants roaming the countryside.
Look more closely at the last 50,000 years:
Around 11,700 years ago, global temperatures rose by approximately 10 degrees Celsius in the space of a few decades. Not centuries. Decades. The climate can move with extraordinary speed entirely independently of human activity. The Younger Dryas cold snap that preceded it — a sudden plunge back to near-glacial temperatures that lasted over a thousand years — ended so abruptly that it shows up as a single layer in ice cores. If that rate of temperature change were happening today, in either direction, there would not be enough TV studios in Britain to broadcast the ensuing hysteria.
During the Roman conquest of Britain 2,000 years ago, they grew grapes as far north as Hadrian’s Wall which separated England from Scotland. The Medieval Warm Period that followed was warm enough that the Vikings colonised Greenland and farmed it — which is why they called it Greenland and not “Fuck-Me-It’s-Freezing-Land.”
Then came the Little Ice Age. The Thames froze so regularly between 1300 and 1800 that Londoners held “Frost Fairs” on it — markets, ox roasts, and funfairs on the frozen river. The last one was in 1814. None of these events make it into the standard climate presentation. They are inconvenient not because they disprove warming, but because they demolish the claim that current temperatures are unprecedented and that temperature stability is the natural order of things.
The first thing we need to get into our heads is that neither the current temperature nor the rate of change in temperature are historically unprecedented.
The second point I wish the reality deniers would accept is this:
