Why we all need to cool down about a couple of hot days

IN THE winter of 1962-1963, the whole country was coated thickly with snow and ice, the sea froze and I suspect that, without the steam railway engines we had at the time, the nation would have come to a halt. It left a deep impression. And it was still much in the minds of the BBC when, in November 1974, they screened a two-hour special programme warning of a coming ice age. The cover of the Radio Times that week showed the planet capped by a huge ice sheet, beneath the headline ‘the ice age cometh’.

It said ice a mile thick had covered Britain in the past and was ‘due again’.

An article inside showed London trapped in an ‘icy tomb’. It warned of ‘the threat of ice and the obliteration of northern lands – including Britain’. The Corporation, which is now convinced we will all boil to death instead, produced pages of charts and pictures saying the South of France would be like Finland, Scotland would look like Greenland, there would be glaciers in California and ‘much of Europe would be a dusty, bitterly cold desert’. Magnus Magnusson and Eric Porter, presumably chosen for their serious grimness, intoned for two hours about the coming freezing doom.

The Daily Mail’s TV reviewer, Martin Jackson, remarked, after watching the marathon lecture: ‘Those hot balmy English summers of our youth are unlikely to return.’

Feel free to laugh. It is quite funny, especially as it is the BBC, now so obsessed with warming. But I have no idea what the weather will be like tomorrow, or what the climate will do ten years hence. I think we should all be a good deal more careful about prophesying such things on the basis of a couple of hot days, or even a few freezing weeks.