Hugo Rifkind – formerly of this parish, now a columnist in the Times – has written a Jeremiad blaming climate sceptics for this jolly hot summer we’re having. He admits that it is ‘overkill’ to make such a silly claim. But then goes on to make it anyway by accusing sceptics of helping to create a ‘political landscape in which inaction became a powerful rallying cry for much of the right’.
And what’s even worse, fumes our Hugo, they haven’t even got the decency to apologise for the damage done by their ‘blithe and ill-faith narratives’. Instead of wailing ‘mea culpa’ at Right-All-Along Rifkind as he crunches his sweaty way across the ‘Velcro-like grass’ in Hyde Park, these slippery sceptics have just slunk away and pretended it never happened.
The increase in global mean temperature over the last 150 years has been actually pretty modest
Not a word of this is true, though. And I should know because I’m one of the sceptics Rifkind singles out for blame, when he refers sneerily to a Spectator cover story I wrote in 2009 headlined ‘Relax: Global Warming Is All A Myth’. ‘Hmm. Was it?’ asks Rifkind, rhetorically. Yes, it was, Hugo. And it still very much is.
That’s why, far from crawling under a rock out of embarrassment for the role my scientific ignorance played in our boiling world’s imminent destruction, I have of late been doubling down on my claims.
