2010 was the joint warmest year ever

According to the global warming freaks.

Strangely, according to the rest of us, it was bloody freezing. I've never in my lifetime known temperatures approaching the -18C we were seeing on a regular basis in Ireland during December.

But obviously, I'm wrong and actually the weeks of snow, the crappy summer and the record low temperatures were a hallucination and in fact I ought to have been out sunbathing.

Because of course, it was actually the warmest year we've ever had.

Meanwhile in other news, Marilyn Monroe is set to marry Elvis at his mansion on the moon, with Shergar as best man and Hitler as bridesmaid.

The cult of AGW

It's been the coldest winter since 1963 here in Ireland, apparently.

And we're not unique. Most of the planet has been experiencing exceptionally cold weather this winter.

This goes quite a long way towards explaining why you don't hear the words 'global warming' being bandied about so much any more.

These days, the buzz words are 'climate change'. I'd be inclined to refer to climate changing by its old-fashioned title, 'weather'.

But plenty of the true believers in the cult of anthropogenic global warming are still keen to claim that armageddon is imminent, and it's all your fault and mine for, well, existing basically.

Global warming, yesterday.

On BBC Radio 4 today, they were covering the British parliament's grilling of the lying scientists who conspired to fabricate data, cover up the truth and twist the results of research.

They then turned to some invited 'expert' to respond. I didn't catch his name. I wish I had because he should be added to the list of lying scumbags banking research grants for peddling this tosh.

He hummed and hawed about his lying colleagues getting busted, then went on to insist that, of course, none of this should impact at all on the need to reduce carbon emissions, the pressing need for carbon taxes, and so on and so forth.

Amazingly, the presenter didn't call him on any of this crap. But that's the nature of religious faith. One cannot question under any circumstances.

Yes, oil is running out and we need to be smarter about how we use it (ban SUVs for a start), and we need to find replacement sources of energy.

But that is no reason to seek to tax the developed world to the point of penury. There's a perfectly simple and indisputable reason for our cold weather. It's called the solar minimum.

When the sun flares up with nuclear force on its surface, it sends waves of additional heat and light our way. These flares are called sunspots, and they occur in cycles. We're at the bottom of the cycle currently, so there are virtually no sunspots and as a result, much less heat for us.

When there were plenty of sunspots a few years back, the world was exceptionally warm, and that's when this global warming crap began getting propagated.

So, since we know their scientific underpinning for AGW (man-made global warming/cooling/change/whatever you're having yourself) is not only junk science but deliberate lies, the only remaining question is why is the cult still propagating this?

Well, what is the result of a carbon tax? It's a penalty on the developed world for being developed. It's a glass ceiling on the prospects of the developing world to continue improving the lives of those living there. In short, it's a charter for reversing development.

In other words, it's more back-to-hobbiton fantasies from the Gaia-brigade, who'd like nothing more than to see mankind reduced to a few hundred thousand people living in an imaginary vegan wonderland without machinery, transport, or anything that might interrupt their fantasy idyll.

It's a cult, and it's time to stop pandering to them. They're more dangerous than any other bunch of crazy faith-based loonies right now, including the Roman Catholic paedo-clerics, the Islamo-fascist suicide bombers or the Judaic imperialists.

These people want to end the world as we know it. In proposing one spoof Armageddon, they hope to bring about a real one.

They need to be stopped. This nonsense has gone too far and for far too long already.

It's time we repudiated their ever-changing anti-human, anti-development lies and stopped letting them take us for sheep that will believe any old rubbish, and happily pay to be returned to the middle ages.

Nostricles in my frostrils

I woke up with nostricles in my frostrils this morning.

That's when I realised the boiler had packed in again.

I really, really am getting bored with being freezing all the time.

Having to undergo a crash course in boiler engineering by mobile phone in the dark in sub zero temperatures was not one of my resolutions for 2010.

But at least it's working now.

Global warming, where are you?

Global warming presents cool animal deathmatch

Aren't you just fed up with hobbits and hippies going on about global warming?

Isn't there a large part of you that loves driving cars with big engines, flying off to Europe for the weekend and heating your home?

And don't you secretly yearn for the day when the globe actually does warm a bit so that Ireland doesn't seem like it's lost in a permanent monsoon mist all the time?

Well, feel guilty no longer. If it were not for the global warming phenomenon, we wouldn't be having cool animal death matches like this one.

Be honest - who wouldn't pay good money to see a shark fighting a polar bear?

Apparently the bears are heavier with longer reach, but the sharks are older and faster.

In the blue corner, sporting the fin and razor-sharp rows of meat-shredding teeth...

In the red corner, weighing in at one tonne...

Daft birds singing in the dead of night

Dublin, January, 2.30 in the morning. Afflicted again by insomnia, I am standing, chilled, in the sodden remnants of the back garden.

And birds are singing.

For sure, the sky is not exactly the ebony emptiness speckled with flickering stars that nighttime evokes in rural areas. A swathe of clouds to the north, towards the city centre, are reflecting back to ground the amber glow of streetlights.

And in the gaps between the orange clouds, the sky is that greyed-out kind of cornflower blue which one generally associates with dull November afternoons, the ones that end in sudden rain.

But this is the middle of the night, not the afternoon. And it is January, nearly the darkest time of the year. We are many hours from sunrise.

So why are the birds singing?

I can hear starlings and sparrows, and a number of other songbirds my urban ears are incapable of identifying. They are all singing, a full throated dawn chorus. In the middle of the night.

I'm no naturalist, as I said. So I don't know if this is a perfectly normal thing for birds to do. Though I suspect something is deeply wrong here. Wrong against the natural order, if you will.

Perhaps this error on the part of local birdlife is something to do with global warming, akin to migratory flocks taking off at the wrong time of year, or snowdrops peeking through the ground in Autumn and not the New Year.

Or perhaps there is another explanation, in which case, I would genuinely love to hear it.

Why are the birds singing in the middle of the night? Is this unique to Dublin or is it happening elsewhere? Perhaps there is some folksy country aphorism that can explain this? 'Birds sing at night – your ecology is shite.'

I'm actually a little concerned by this. If anyone can explain this phenomenon, please let me know what the birds are doing and why.

It might help me sleep a little easier.

Man plans, Cod laughs

There's something fishy about this. Apparently, codfish in the North Atlantic are dying out.

Well, no shit, Sherlock. My fishmonger could have told you that. Cod used to be a staple in poor households that couldn't afford meat, even the cheap cuts. Nowadays, fresh cod is rarer and more expensive than smoked salmon.

But according to the wonks behind this study, it's nothing to do with the fact that we've had half of all boats in Europe out dredge-netting the region for cod for the past forty years.

It's global warming. Isn't it always global warming?

But if it was global warming, then why aren't the cod being found further north, up by Iceland?

This EU-funded research neatly sidesteps blaming overfishing by the European fleet for devastating cod stocks. And anyone who believes its thesis that we haven't wiped out cod simply by eating too many of them will be prepared to let the same boats overfish the next species.

Global warming is becoming a cover story for all sorts of other nasties. It's a classic example of vested interests hijacking the environmental banner for their own reasons.

An ancient Jewish saying has it that while man plans, God laughs. Well, if we plan fish stocks and fishing rights on the basis of this type of junk science, then the last laugh's on us. Apart from the cod, who we'll have eaten to extinction by then.

By the way, that picture of the man with the fish above? That's the size a cod is supposed to grow to. When was the last time you saw a cod that size? When was the last time you saw a cod, full stop?

Global Warming is SO unfair

Here I am, in the hills of Northern Spain (in the preposterous republic of Basqueland), in mid-November, and the sun is splitting the trees. Not only that, but today and yesterday it was in the low twenties, centigrade wise.

Now, locals inform me that in times past, being in a mountainous region meant getting snowed on at this time of year. Instead, they´re wearing T-shirts to the shops and enjoying their swimming pools.

Meanwhile, in huge chunks of Africa, where the delightful combo of AIDS, war and corruption have already made life beyond difficult for most people, global warming is destroying what little arable land was left. Kenya, among others, is losing its farmland and, just as important, the habitats in which wild animals live.

And in Ireland, global warming has so far managed to lead to even more bloody rain than we had before.

My conclusion is that climate change is inherently unfair, and that those who benefit from it, like the Basques, should ante up for those losing out, like the Kenyans and the Irish.