Boris outflanks AGW

Who could not laugh, seeing Transport Secretary Philip Hammond standing in the snow, promising that the government would consult "experts" to see if more money should be spent on measures to deal with snow in coming years?

Sadly, in the clip he wasn't asked about snow and AGW. But the government may decide that transport seize ups in future years could cost it an unacceptable number of votes. So it would put in place measures to mitigate against cold - not warming.

Hammond says  of course we can deal with snow more effectively, but it will cost more money and what would we want to spend less on?

(Incidentally, we've had hardly any coverage of how the rest of Europe is coping. Hammond mentioned something about lorries being banned from roads in parts of Northern France. The media seem to be reporting the weather unimaginatively and on the cheap, just sticking a couple of junior reporters out in the snow to tell us that ... hm ... it's snowing.)

Someone should try to collar Mr Huhne about this. If we face colder winters, should we cheer him for making it dearer to heat our homes? Mightn't that cost the government lots of votes too?

No - not as long as the Opposition support this government policy. But does the government really want to rely on the Opposition being consistent?

Enter Boris with a political masterstroke. Piers Corbyn bases his weather forecasts on the sun, and has recently been right more often than the Met Office. Indeed, says Boris, he "seems to get it right about 85 per cent of the time".

Here's the clever bit:

Piers Corbyn believes that the last three winters could be the harbinger of a mini ice age that could be upon us by 2035, and that it could start to be colder than at any time in the last 200 years. He goes on to speculate that a genuine ice age might then settle in, since an ice age is now cyclically overdue.

But Boris can't renounce the faith, or the Tory high church of AGW believers will cast him for ever into outer darkness.

So he elegantly changes the question:

The question is whether anthropogenic global warming is the exclusive or dominant fact that determines our climate, or whether Corbyn is also right to insist on the role of the Sun.

Is it possible, he asks, that everything we do is dwarfed by the moods of the star that gives life to the world?

Boris is not an apostate. But if Philip Hammond has to bring in more anti-snow measures, if the cold forces Chris Huhne to rescue a few people from the fuel poverty that misguided prig has plunged them into, when the false religion of AGW crumbles ... Boris will be waiting.