Latif / Keenlyside / Cooling, revisited

The malign Nature effect, again refers.

In the hotly contested competition to see who are the biggest tossers in the british newspaper industry there has been an early entry this year by the Daily Mail: The mini ice age starts here based mainly on the fact that, oh, it has snowed a bit. And not helped by the UKMO pratting around with seasonal forecasts they know full well are worthless to the general public. Whether or not this makes the Mail more stupid that the Torygraph I leave for you to judge (incidentally, for you Johnny Foreigners lucky enough not to know what the Mail is, its a tabloid rag somewhat above the Sun but well below the Broadsheets, but with pretensions to respectability).

But what makes this little episode especially amusing is that the Grauniad (unlike the Mail) actually bothered to talk to Latif and he pretty well told them the Mail were a bunch of wazzocks. After that, he said something quite thoughtful which is nice: “There are numerous newspapers, radio stations and television channels all trying to get our attention. Some overstate and some want to downplay the problem as a way to get that attention,” he said. “We are trying to discuss in the media a highly complex issue. Nobody would discuss the problem of [Einstein’s theory of] relativity in the media. But because we all experience the weather, we all believe that we can assess the global warming problem”. Ah yes.