A WORLD WITHOUT PORPOISe ROUND BLACKPOOL TOWER

So that's it then. It's official The Ice Cap will have melted in a decade. Our Prime Sinister only gave us five days but, as usual, though he may have made the world safe for marauding banks, he was wrong.

All the same, that's me hunting for a 3XXX wet suit and joining the porpoises swimming round the top of Blackpool Tower.

Hold your foot up. This melting of the ice caps which is going to cause the waters to rise and drown us all...........................................????? I am not trying to do a Canute, but when the ice turns to water, won't the water just take the place that used to be filled by ice? So the level will hardly rise at all, surely?

I am told that if the ice were to melt away completely the oceans would rise no further that the volume in a glass of gin-and-tonic to which a lump of ice had been added. Believe me, I have done the research. The level in the glass does not rise perceptibly when the cubes have melted away.

Global warning is attractive to governments. Lots of new laws, making us even easier to control, and no one living today will ever know whether they were right or wrong. Scientists who support the theory get $4 billion in grants. Carbon trading brings in $2-3 trillion a year. Yet two prominent oceanographers, David B. Ericson and Goesta Wollin, estimate: “A new theory to explain continental glaciations has been published for every year that has passed since the first recognition of the evidence for past glaciation."

The EU promises to save the world with wind turbines. OK if the wind is blowing, but a lot of the time it isn’t. Solar cells are fine if the sun is shining, except that a lot of the time it isn’t, especially at night. Tidal systems work where there is a suitable coastal feature, but there aren’t many. Bio-fuels? The country’s entire grain crop would be needed to power our road transport.

Many scientists dismiss wind farms as government subsidies and have demonstrated that energy consumed in building thousands of new solar cell factories would create a long term warming debt. Cells convert less than twelve per cent of the sun's rays into electricity. The rest is re-radiated as heat, contributing to global warming. Professor Ian Plimer, the Australian geologist whose new book Heaven And Earth: Global Warming — the Missing Science Quartet (£25), shows that ‘anthropogenic global warming’ is a dangerous, ruinously expensive fiction, a ‘first-world luxury’ with no basis in scientific fact.

He says polar ice has been present on earth for less than 20 per cent of geological time; extinctions of life are normal; climate changes are cyclical and random; the CO2 in the atmosphere - to which human activity contributes the tiniest fraction - is only 0.001 per cent of the total CO2 held in the oceans, surface rocks, air, soils and life; CO2 is not a pollutant but a plant food; the earth’s warmer periods - such as when the Romans grew grapes and citrus trees as far north as Hadrian’s Wall - were times of wealth and plenty.

Climate IS changing. That is what climate does. The most persistent myths are the drowned kingdoms round the UK, the drowned city Atlanta and the Great Flood. Years ago I interviewed a scientist at the Marine Science Laboratory at the University of Wales. His team operated a giant drill which excavated samples of the earth's core. They found evidence of a world-wide flood. An academic chum of mine conducting an underwater survey of the Gwynedd coast discovered outlines of dwellings far out to sea. The Vikings farmed in Greenland; the Chinese sailed right round the Arctic in 1421 - and there was little ice at the North Pole.

Worryingly, eight peer-reviewed studies, significantly supporting roles in global warnings, are fraudulent. Rings from twelve trees at the Yamal peninsula in Siberia were used to ‘reconstruct’ past temperatures. They indicated pronounced and dramatic uptick in temperatures. A wider test of trees from the Peninsula showed no dramatic recent warming. Perversely, the Yamal peninsula contains the biggest field of gas reserves on the planet which will release millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and, on the peninsula itself, pose a grave threat to the Nenets reindeer herders and their ancient way of life. That won't be a consideration. Gazprom, Russia's state energy giant, says there is nearly 38 trillion cubic metres on the peninsula and in adjacent offshore fields – enough to supply Europe for several decades. Putin invited international energy companies to become partners in extracting Yamal's gas reserves, hinting at vast profits from what is now the world's biggest energy project.

Happily, studies of Victorian mariners' logs show man-made greenhouse gases are having less impact than many scientists claim. Since there were no marine chronometers until the 19th century, ships' captains needed to log very accurate weather details, including wind speed and direction, in order to gauge their longitude. HMS Dorothea's 1818 ship’s log gives the earliest account of weather in the Norwegian Arctic and shows the summer of 1818 was not markedly colder than was typical in the late 20th century.

That doesn't mean we can stop worrying. The logs helped to prove the effect on the climate of volcanic eruptions. Several captains observed a decline in temperature in 1816, which became known as the year without a summer. The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 sent so much sun reflecting sulphur into the atmosphere that global temperatures dipped the following year, with snow reported in June in New York State.
The most compelling evidence for the prosecution in the Giant Weather Hoax comes from Nathan Myhrvold, who researched quantum cosmology research with Stephen Hawking, founded the Microsoft Research laboratory and of whom Bill Gates said, “I don't know anyone who is smarter.” He says the global warming rhetoric is exaggerated.
His view is shared by the physist Lowell Wood. Myhrvold's academic tutor and a protégé of Edward Teller, Wood works for the US government, various universities and the Star Wars missile defence system. He insists climate models being used cannot even do giant storms. He claims, that although sea levels rose by 425 feet in the last 12,000 years, the bulk of the rise was in the first thousand years. In the past century the rise has been less than eight feet.
Myrhrvold agrees: “In the Seventies there was a global panic that the earth was cooling. The trend began to reverse when we cleaned the air. Most of the global warming is due to good stewardship.” He pointed out the carbon dioxide level 80 million years ago was at least 1,000 parts per million, which is the regulation standard inside new energy-efficient office buildings.
Ken Caldeira, one of the most respected climate scientists in the world who runs an ecology lab at Stamford University, agrees that human activity is responsible for some global warming but maintains that carbon dioxide is not the cause. A doubling of carbon dioxide traps less than two per cent of the radiation emitted from the earth.
The three scientists, part financed by Bill Gates, run a company called Intellectual Ventures Inc., an invention company in which scientists and puzzle solvers dream up solutions and take out 500 patents every year. Their solution? Those ships' logs showed that volcanoes affected climate by sending sulphur dioxide into the tropesphere; 34 gallons per minute of sulphur dioxide in water was enough to cool the climate. Ventures Inc. plan to pump 34 gallons of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere per minute through a multi-nozzled,18 miles long, 2 inch hosepipe. Stratospheric prevailing winds of 100 mph would wrap the vapour round the earth in twenty minutes. The system could be working in two years at a cost of £20 million, with annual operating costs of about ten million. They have even picked the site. The oil sands in Alberta have mountains of waste sulphur for which no use can be found. Myhrvold says: “Sulphur would be burned into sulphur dioxide and then liquified. With one corner of a sulphur mountain we could solve the whole global warming problem for the northern hemisphere.”
Sounds bizarre but infinitely preferable to coating the countryside with windmills of the mindless.
Fossil Fuels pay for Wahhabi-ism. We buy oil; they stash weapons to use against us. The West supplies weapons and bribes Saudi princes to buy them. It is like Saladin sending his scimitar round to Richard One's tent to get it sharpened on the Royal Grindstone.
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RUNNETH OVER
Bizarre tragedy struck the Detroit Marathon last Sunday when three men died within16 minutes. Daniel Langdon, 36, collapsed at 9.02am local time between the 11- and 12-mile markers; Rick Brown, 65, fell in the same area at 9.17am; and a minute later 26-year-old Jon Fenlon collapsed just after finishing the half-marathon. Naturally I am anti both marathon running and jogging. Hipkin, our eighty year old gardener, cannot understand me. He has bought himself a skipping rope, which he uses every chance he gets.
I warned him that Jim Fixx, the man credited with turning a continent on to physical fitness in the 1970s, keeled over and died while on a four-mile run at the age of 52. Fixx took up running in the 1960s when he weighed 220pounds. When he died in 1984, he was down to 159 pounds. Bob Hughes, the Australian art critic, penned the following in ten minutes after being challenged to write his epitaph:
The Glutton gross in paunch and thigh
Eludes the Reaper Grim.
Swollen of nose and pink of eye,
The drunkard laughs at him

The chair-bound Journalist, the Don,
Carelessly quaff champagne,
The Pop Star lives forever, on
Pills, Bimbos and cocaine.

Frustrated by this doleful news,
Death newer victims picks,
He laces on his jogging shoes
And catches up with FIXX.

Another canard of our sorry times is that obesity kills. I am 80 and eight stone over weight and, although it's tried pretty hard, it still hasn't killed me. If I am dead by the time you read this, the argument still stands, with the added bonus that I will miss the Olympic Games and won't worry about this notice on the wall at a March Old People's Home: “Be kind to your kids. They are the ones who will choose your nursing home.”



A COURTLY GESTURE
A man who slapped a police horse across the face claimed it had stood on his foot. Christopher Taylor swore at mounted policeman PC Adam Pearson and police horse Sawley – telling him and his "ugly" horse to go away. Taylor, 26, of Anderson Street, Blackpool, admitted being drunk and disorderly.

QUESTIONABLE TIME

A young articulate black man in the audience and a Muslim Peer on the panel were agreed there should be a cap on immigration, yet they criticised Griffin's ethnic stance. The panel prated on about freedom of speech at the same time as they questioned his right to be on the programme.

I cannot conceive of joining or supporting the BNP but, once invited, he should have been given a courteous hearing. As it was, the whole programme was devoted to bashing one of the guests, a bashing in which the supposedly impartial chairman joined. I have long thought the programme would be improved by a competent chairman but the BBC uses nepotism as a substitute for racism.
(the letter The Guardian rejected)