Coincidentally, the first easing of covid-19 restrictions came on the same day that global warming ended.

Snow, in mid-April, in the South.

Don't tell me that weather is not climate. I know that. The point is that if it can snow in mid-April, in the South, then your predictions are about as much use as a brick made of fudge.

"But we're not predicting weather, we're predicting global warming and its impacts!"

Did you predict more or less snow?

In April. In the south.

"But this is just an extremely rare event, it doesn't disprove global warming!"

It proves that global warming is bullshit, even if it's real.

Bicester, Oxfordshire, this morning... https://twitter.com/paulJpitt1967/status/1381492400749740032

Imagine... You had your car prohibited, and you have to use the bus. You forked out the best part of three years' worth of before-tax salary to retrofit your home. Then your employer shut down. Now you spend 1.5 hours on the bus each way to a job that pays you half as much...

... You had to borrow against your home to afford the mandated upgrade, but now you're earning less, you can't afford the mortgage repayments, you're in negative equity, and you can't afford to travel to where you might get a job. All because global warming...

... And then it snows. In April. In the south of England.

What do you do?

I had a big long argument with a climate scientist in around 2010. At the time, the road I lived on had been under ice for weeks.

I asked him about the snow, he said that extreme cold "was consistent with global warming/climate change".

The argument centred around the term "consistent with". I argued he should say "not inconsistent with".

The implication of "consistent with" is that the event is predicted by the hypothesis, whereas "not inconsistent with" means the hypothesis is not contradicted by the event.

I would have been happy with 'not inconsistent with'. But the desire for the impression of greater precision than the science is capable of is a political impulse.

And *it* politicises snow. In mid April. In England. In the south.

In fact it was 2009. We had had snow the year earlier... Here's a couple of photos taken on Easter Sunday, March 23 2008 in York.

And here's the offending article from February 2009...

'"Even though this is quite a cold winter by recent standards it is still perfectly consistent with predictions for global warming," said Dr Myles Allen...'

https://web.archive.org/web/20090205010539/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/4436934/Snow-is-consistent-with-global-warming-say-scientists.html

So, we had snow at Easter in 2008. Winter made the headlines again in the winter of 2008/2009. And unfortunately for Myles Allen, the winter of 2009/10 even has its own Wikipedia page, it was so bad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of_2010%E2%80%9311_in_Great_Britain_and_Ireland

Apologies, that was the winter of 2010-11.

This is the Wikipedia page for 2009-10! It was also so bad that it had its own Wiki page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of_2009%E2%80%9310_in_Great_Britain_and_Ireland

Climate/weather politics aficionados will remember that the final reading of the UK Climate Change Bill (2008) coincided with the first October snowfall in London since 1922. https://www.theregister.com/2008/10/29/commons_climate_change_bill/

And the winter of 2011-12 saw some pretty extreme snow, too. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2099233/UK-weather-forecast-After-temperatures-plunged-MINUS-18C--ready-half-term-thaw.html

So why am I banging on about snow?

Well, there's the obvious, 'children aren't going to know what snow is.

In fact my childhood (the 2nd half thereof) was marred by a dearth of snow.

I grew up in Oxford, where it snowed today. In mid-April. https://twitter.com/thescareyone/status/1381498467646902275

I had been given a classic wooden sledge from Hamley's for my eighth birthday. I used it once. It sat unused in my bedroom until I was about 16.

Perhaps that disappointment is what made me something of a green for the next decade.

But then there's the fact that whereas we hear endlessly that impacts of climate change will affect our lives for the much, much worse, perhaps pushing us to the brink of extinction, without challenge in UK politics or media...

It is snowing. In south England. In mid April.

It is not that the snowfall disproves the hypotheses that the world is warming due to CO2 emissions, or that this has changed the climate.

It DOES challenge the claim that the degree of climate change and its impacts can be detected sufficient to make the case for policy.

Why?

Because of the counter-hypothesis that planning and policy must take account of all possible weather events & climatic conditions, not probabilistic forecasting.

And that global warming does not require special forms of (anti-democratic) politics to deal with it.

What it proves is that the global warming hypothesis offers zero useful, actionable information to policymakers and politics.

Worse. It shows us that #netzero may be a fatal mistake.

Climate change has brought no misery to these shores, except perhaps, allegedly, but not for long, it denied some children some snow for some years.

And there is little reason to think that milder winters or slightly more frequent warm days elsewhere is a death knell, either.

The sum total of the *potential* threat of climate change is slightly different weather than that we may or may not be accustomed to.

But we got accustomed to mild winters and warm early springs pretty damn quickly, didn't we, more fool us.