Dick And A Climate Change Checklist

Today is dry and sunny in Crewe, as it was yesterday and the day before. But elsewhere in the country the rains came, and in places in biblical proportions. The Diamond Jubilee river Pageant was played out in unseasonably cold and wet conditions, but if they’d chosen the previous weekend that could have been replaced by heatstroke. Welcome to the world of ever changing weather patterns.

Warming, guv? Last night's Madras, innit?!?

But for the Daily Mail’s tedious and unfunny churnalist Richard Littlejohn, this is a chance to dust off the checklist of climate change tall tales, so his lead item today is filled with strawmen, exaggeration and downright whoppers in order for him to tick off as many boxes as he can muster in his tirade against the scientific consensus – and of course the real world.

The predictions were rubbish: “France would be virtually uninhabitable” [whopper: check!], global warming was an “imminent threat” [exaggeration: check!], “Britain was burning up” [ditto], “The Midlands would resemble a Grapes Of Wrath style dustbowl” [whopper: check!], “grapevines growing in the Pennines” [ditto], because what’s really happening is “half the country ... under three feet of water” [ditto].

“Britain’s weather has always been unpredictable” [strawman: check!], “Islamist suicide bomber” [Muslims to blame: check!], “temperatures peaked in 1998 and the world has been getting colder ever since” [whopper: check!], “it became apparent that temperatures were actually falling” [ditto], “the cooler weather was merely a ‘blip’” [ditto]. But he’s not played the victim yet. Has Dick forgotten?

What Dick isn't showing his readers

Oh no he hasn’t: “Those of us who had the audacity [involuntary Derek and Clive reference: check!] to pour scorn on their new orthodoxy were smeared as ‘deniers’ – no better than Nazi apologists” [holocaust false equivalence: check!], “The virulence of their character assassination” [victimhood: check!] [hypocrisy: check!], “desperation of their dishonest cause” [ditto].

And a dash of historical whataboutery, perchance? You betcha, says Sarah: “we had ice fairs on the Thames hundreds of years ago” [irrelevant intervention: check!], “Britain experienced a well-documented warm period in medieval times” [ditto], “the recent drought was proof positive that the world will soon run out of water” [whopper: check!], “it hasn’t stopped raining since” [ditto].

Then it’s on to another strawman, this time on oil spills: “After Saddam Hussein flooded the Persian Gulf with crude oil [whopper: check!] we were told the pollution would last two million years” [ditto]. And what, pray, has this to do with climate change, Dickie boy? Who knows? But the Government and the BBC are also to blame [Beeb bashing: check!].

Telling a string of whoppers doesn’t make your targets liars, Dick. It makes you one.