Inconvenient truth

IN a major report last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gave a grave assessment of how man-made global warming was rapidly destroying the Arctic ice-cap.

Steadily increasing temperatures had made the pack ice contract by up to 12 per cent between 1979 and 2012, leading to rising sea levels which threatened to swamp coastal regions – not to mention endangering polar bears.

By the middle of the century ‘a nearly ice-free Arctic Ocean’ was likely for a l arge part of the year, the report predicted.

How interesting then, that the latest analysis of 88 million measurements from the European Space Agency’s Cryosat satellite show the northern ice- cap INCREASED by a jaw-dropping 41 per cent in 2013 and despite a tiny fall last year, is bigger than at any time for decades.

Of course, the climatologists will come up with explanations - as they did for the fact that the earth is actually colder now than it was at the beginning of this century. They’ll say 2013 was a freak year, that in spite of temporary fluctuations long-term trends remain the same, that cooling ‘episodes’ are as much a feature of climate change as warming and so on.

But the more they juggle their theories to fit the inconvenient facts, the more people will question whether their prophesies of global doom are based on genuine science, or simply guesswork.

And they will rightly wonder whether saddling ordinary people and businesses with a raft of spurious green taxes will serve any real purpose – rather than being a pointless and expensive exercise in gesture politics.