Too Warm For Denial

April 2011, for the UK, has been the warmest April on record, which gives, along with December 2010, two record breaking months out of the last five, albeit at opposite ends of the temperature scale.

In December, the climate change denial crowd were in full cry: over at the Maily Telegraph, Christopher Booker – the one who claims asbestos is no more harmful than talcum powder – churned out knocking copy every week (see HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE). Even the Queensland floods were the fault of those who opposed him, and of course the BBC was also to blame.

Now it is rather different: Booker’s last snipe at climate change orthodoxy was an attack on Bob Ward of the Grantham Institute on March 19. Even the return of Booker’s obedient gofer James Delingpole yesterday mainly avoided his usually favoured attack on that orthodoxy, although he was once more promoting shale gas, a topic to which I shall return.

And this is not A Good Thing: as has been shown, there is a difference between transient weather patterns and climate change, the latter being a change that occurs over the longer term. That the denial camp cease their focus with a change in the weather is telling.

The only conclusion that can be drawn is that climate change denial is a subject only for cold winter evenings: if so, that removes another plank of credibility from its adherents.