News

June 22, 2009

Heaven and Earth, A New Look at Climate Change by Professor Ian Plimer

By Charles Wyatt

Last week research led by the Met office forecast that London could have summer temperatures up to 40 degrees C by 2080. The report said that flooding, storms, droughts and heatwaves are all to become more common as a result of rising temperatures with negative impacts on health, lifestyles and the countryside. Not to be outdone the Financial Times Weekend Magazine published a piece this week by Sam Knight claiming that by 2050 hundreds of millions of people could be forced from their lands by climate change.

Those with longer memories will remember that  in the 1970s the BBC, supported by the Met Office, published a pamphlet explaining that we were on the verge of entering a mini-ice age. The BBC may have got its reasoning right forty years ago. Crops this year have been hit badly by a very cold winter: it has snowed in June in large parts of Western Canada and the northern parts of the American Midwest; frosts have been reported  in Brazil and freak hailstorms in China;...