What is this "climate change"?

Just what is this “climate change”?

As Southern England suffers storm after storm, and Julia Sligo of the Met Office insinuates that climate change may be to blame, it’s instructive to see tweets looking back to those distant days when climate change enthusiasts predicted it would cause dryer weather.

Thus in 2006 George Monbiot claimed that “the freshwater boom is over. Our rivers are starting to run dry”! We can avert global thirst, he said – “but it means cutting carbon emissions by 60%”.

And in 2012 we were told that Caroline Spelman had said climate change could mean that drought is “the new normal”. She urged water companies to produce long-term plans for saving water.

But what is this “climate change”? It can’t be the dry (or now wet) weather, because that was (or is) supposedly an effect of this climate change. It can’t be increasing emissions of carbon dioxide, because that is just what it says, increases in a trace gas going into the atmosphere.

Can it be global warming? That stopped 17 years ago and hasn’t restarted. How would that work, then? It caused dryer weather and now it’s causing wetter weather? A stalled temperature rise causes whatever the weather happens to be at the time – even if that weather isn’t unprecedented?

Hm.

So what is this “climate change”?

“Climate change” is an empty black box. Into it go increased emissions of a trace gas, out of it come droughts or floods, take your pick. Maybe plagues of locusts? If the locusts appear, George and Caroline, all the Lib Dems, and Ed Miliband, and the other charlatans will claim a consensus of climate scientists predicted them all along, while the Environment Agency will create reserves where the locusts can flourish.

Anything to try to justify their compulsion to control us – however implausible, however tawdry.