HOT, STICKY AND SUCKS... THE CASE AGAINST SUMMERTIME. posted by lenin

I suppose anyone living in the Middle East can have themselves a little chuckle at the fact that we residents of this Brit-hole are actually getting some of their non-weather. For the past week, it's been nothing but hot, sticky, cloudless and still. It's getting so bad, the pollution's decided to take a hike up North for a spell of cold.
The newspapers are warning us of likely increase in asthma, heart attacks, strokes, baldness, finger cancer, tube strikes, bunking off work, people being unnecessarily aggressive etc etc. As if we needed more scaremongering to make our lives easier.

On top of that, unlike Europe the United Kingdom has never got itself up to speed with air-conditioning. The tube carries us to and from work at temperatures that its actually illegal to transport cattle in. Being in a bus is like sitting in an enclosed magnifying box for some sadistic god to shine rays of sunlight through. My office is like a fan-assisted oven, with one pizza-sized whirring chunk of metal blowing warm air about the room. Proles inc. is a sweltering stove.

The punchline:

Bjorn Llomborg, the ubiquitous author of "The Sceptical Environmentalist" appeared on the box to tell us all to chill out.

"Hey, look, not all of the effects of global warming would be bad. Actually, the immediate result would be warmer winters. And that would save 9,000 lives every year in the UK. Now, far fewer lives are lost due to excess heat each year than are lost due to excess cold. And what I'm saying is, ought we really be diverting energy and funds to an enormously expensive problem that we can't really do anything about when there are other more serious problems that we can do something about right now?"

If this isn't deliberate casuistry, it is at the very least severely myopic. The issue, surely, is not that we might in the short run have slightly warmer winters. Rather it is that these trends are symptoms of an underlying problem. In the short run, warmer winters and a less cumbersome coat for granny. In the long term, polar icecaps melting, flooding, the dying out of animals, of certain kinds of plant-life and resultant changes in the eco-sphere whose effects are nigh-on impossible to account for. In addition, changes in the global flow of waters can wreak havoc on weather systems, well boyond making the winters less chilly. In fact, the loss of the Gulf Stream would deprive the UK of a vast protective barrier of warmth against freezing Siberian winds and then we'd be back to fucking square one, with a quarter of a million members of the Conservative Party dying off every winter... hmmm...
Anyway, it seems that there are a whole legion of pseudo-scientists and environmentologists dedicated to providing pat sophistries like those of Mr Llomborg every time a new warning shot is fired. Mark Saunders, head of the Climate Prediction Unit at the University College London, told Spiked Online recently that "'In 2002, the UK and European summer was cool and wet, with severe floods in central Europe. The flooding was attributed to global warming. Now in 2003 the UK and European summer is warm and dry, the opposite of 2002, and this is also attributed to global warming. It seems there is a tendency to attribute any anomalous weather as evidence of global warming."

Yes, but you pick your examples, don't you Mr Saunders? Even Llomborg had to concede that there were long term observable trends toward warmer winters and abnormally hot summers. If some people think 35 degrees Celcius is a pleasant summery temperature even with the humidity (it isn't, you bastards, how could it be), let me mention that the extreme end of the wedge is India, where Summer temperatures of 50 degrees Celcius resulted in people dying.

So, we can either face up to the problem and extricate ourselves from the fuel-economy death-trap, or we can do as Mr Llomborg suggests and fiddle, while London burns.