My house guest and I had lunch in one of those Spanish road-side restaurants which offer a great-value ‘menu of the day’. It was a quite a large place and there were several tables for 10 or 12 people, almost certainly for the passing truck drivers I’ve often seen in these. Each of the tables sported a bottle of whisky, another of brandy and a third of the local post-prandial liqueur. It’s rather sobering to think these are drunk after the wine that’s invariably a part of each meal. My guest asked whether the drivers partook of an afternoon siesta in their cabs. I said I bloodywell hoped so.

Climate change: My thanks to Biopolitical for his comment yesterday. At the end of this blog there’s an idiot’s guide to the opposing views, lifted from today’s Sunday Telegraph, and a riposte to his critics from the producer of the TV documentary that upset the scientific establishment. And left the rest of us – or at least those as yet without the religion – more confused than ever. Right now, the only thing I’m sure of is that Biopolitical is spot on with his view that governments will respond with stupidity.

Which reminds me . . . UK university applicants now not only have to give the names of their parents but also their jobs and their educational achievements. This, says the New Labour Government, will allow universities to indulge in some social engineering aimed at ensuring that ‘deprived’ students are favoured over the more fortunate. My guess is soon there’ll be boxes for colour, race and religion on the application form. And eventually no one will be asked for details of his or her academic achievements to date. All of this is happening at a time when statistics show that 10 years of this sort of tinkering has actually reduced social mobility in the UK. Worst of all, poor kids no longer have the sort of secondary school opportunities that I, for example, had 40 years ago. Perhaps this is why the tertiary set-up has to be fiddled in their favour.

Galicia Facts and Perspectives

The mayor of Pontevedra is going for a third term in the May elections. He’s just announced a list of 1,254 ‘ideas’ for this. He stresses that, next time around, he’ll be concentrating on ‘large infrastructure projects’. Given that much of the city has been mired in roadworks for the last 5 years, I’m left wondering what this can mean. A high-speed train through the middle of it?

And now . . ..

MAN-MADE DISASTER OR NATURAL CHANGE

With questions still hanging over crucial issues around climate change, scientists are adamant about one thing: the debate is far from finished. Few now dispute that the climate is warming, but there remains a split over whether or not human beings are the cause.

The case for man-made climate change

According to most climate scientists, the current period of global warming is being driven by man-made carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. A greenhouse gas, CO2 in the atmosphere reflects heat given off by the Earth back to surface. In simple terms, scientists believe human activities, such as burning fossil fuels and deforestation, have disrupted the natural balance of greenhouse gases, causing temperatures to rise above normal levels.

Prof Piers Forster, a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) fourth report and a climate-change researcher at the University of Leeds, admits that the picture is complicated. However, he insists that greenhouse-gas emissions are the only way to explain the temperature rises being experienced.

"Certainly the story is quite complex," he said. "Since 1970, however, we really start to see a big temperature rise and an increase in greenhouse gases - it is hard to ignore."

Experts also claim that improved understanding of the effects of other pollutants, such as aerosols, help to explain anomalies in the data, such as a period of climate cooling between 1940 and 1970. They believe that soot particles and aerosols masked the overall warming effect of carbon dioxide by providing a protective blanket that acted like a sunscreen to reflect the Suns rays.

But they also admit that there are many questions that still need to be answered before the Earth's climate and the impact of global-warming can be fully understood.

Recent research has also focused on natural systems that may be worsening or dampening the effects of climate change. The role of water vapour, a greenhouse gas, is one of the most poorly understood. Others include the effect of the ocean's ability to absorb heat and carbon dioxide.

The case against man-made global-warming

Scientists on the opposite side of the argument insist that the warming of the planet is due to natural cycles that have been repeated throughout history.

They seize upon one of the most compelling uncertainties in the climate-change debate: the role of the Sun. It is widely accepted that historic ice ages and subsequent warm periods were due to shifts in the Earth's orbit in relation to the Sun, or to the Sun's activity.

Sceptics claim that we are in a period of high solar activity and that warming will end when that activity falls. In the recent report by the IPCC, solar activity had the largest error margins of all the influences on climate. Volcanic activity is also believed to have played a major role in historic shifts.

Prof Richard Lindzen, a prominent climate-change sceptic and meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said: "[The influence of] volcanoes and solar variability is essentially unknown. The issue is reduced to essentially religious faith."

Another key objection of sceptics is the apparent inability of climate-change computer models to accurately explain the level of global warming that is occurring. Evidence from ice and seabed cores also points to the cyclic nature of the warming and cooling of the Earth.

Prof Bob Carter, a marine geophysicist at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia, said: "That climate changes frequently, rapidly and sometimes unpredictably has been conventional knowledge among Earth environmental scientists since the early days of ocean drilling in the 1970s."

Prof Don Easterbrook, a geologist at Western Washington University, believes the Earth is in the grip of a 30-year warming cycle. He said: "Past climatic trends indicate that global climates should begin to cool sometime between now and 2010."

And . . .

The TV producer [Martin Durkin] fights back

On March 8, Channel 4 broadcast my programme. Since then, supporters of the theory of man-made global warming have published frothing criticism. I am attacked for using an "old" graph depicting temperature over the past 1,000 years. They say I should have used a "new" graph - one used by Al Gore, known as the "hockey stick", because it looks like one.

But the hockey stick has been utterly discredited. The computer programme used to generate it was found to produce hockey-stick shapes even when fed random data (I refer readers to the work of McIntyre & McKitrick and to the Wegman Report, all available on the internet). Other than the discredited hockey stick, the graph used by us (and published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is the standard, accepted record of temperature in this period.

A critic claims that one of the graphs cited by us, illustrating the extraordinarily close correlation between solar variation and temperature change, has since been "corrected". It most certainly has not. The graph was produced by Prof Eigil Friis-Christensen, the head of the Danish National Space Centre, who says it still stands. But if the global-warmers don't like that graph, there are plenty of others that say the same thing.

No one any longer seriously disputes the link between solar activity and temperature in earth's climate history. I urge readers to look up on the net: Veizer, Geoscience Canada, 2005; and Soon, Geophysical Research Letters, 2005.

In the film, we used three graphs depicting temperature change in the 20th century. On one there was an error in the dates on the bottom. This was corrected for the second transmission of the programme, on More4, last Monday. It made no difference. Global-warmers can pick whichever graph they like. The problem for them remains the same. The temperature rise at the beginning of the century (prior to 1940, when human emissions of CO2 were relatively insignificant) was as great, most graphs show greater, than the temperature rise at the end of the century.

The remarkable thing is not that I was attacked. But that the attacks have been so feeble. The ice-core data was the jewel in the global-warming crown, cited again and again as evidence that carbon dioxide 'drives' the earth's climate. In fact, as its advocates have been forced to admit, the ice-core data says the opposite. Temperature change always precedes changes in CO2 by several hundred years. Temperature drives CO2, not the other way round. The global-warmers do not deny this. They cannot.

During the post-war economic boom, while industrial emissions of CO2 went up, the temperature went down (hence the great global-cooling scare in the 1970s). Why? They say maybe the cooling was caused by SO2 (sulphur dioxide) produced by industry. But they say it mumbling under their breath, because they know it makes no sense. Thanks to China and the rest, SO2 levels are far, far higher now than they were back then. Why isn't it perishing cold?

Too many journalists and scientists have built their careers on the global-warming alarm. Certain newspapers have staked their reputation on it. The death of this theory will be painful and ugly. But it will die. Because it is wrong, wrong, wrong.


Footnote: If any of them get this far, I'd be interested to know how Galician Nationalists feel about Galicia-warming.