6/23/13, "The weather prophets should be chucked in the deep end," UK Telegraph, Boris Johnson
"Homeowners lumbered with useless swimming pools know precisely who they should blame."
"The great thing about flying into London is that you get bags of time to see
the countryside below. The congestion at Heathrow is so bad that many
passengers circle above the Home Counties for half an hour, allowing
themselves to be penetrated by the splendours of Surrey while their planes
spew thousands of tons of CO2 into the upper air.... Look down on southern England, and you see the little winking ultramarine oblongs of the swimming pools – perhaps the greatest triumph of hope over experience in the history of English domestic architecture. ...
In the past 10 years there have been plenty of
middle-class punters who have decided that they want a touch of Beverly
Hills about their homes....
But then there was an extra spur – the new and unanswerable imperative to find a way of keeping wet and cool. For more than 20 years now, we have been told that this country was going to get hotter and hotter and hotter, and that global warming was going to change our climate in a fundamental way. Do you remember that? We were told that Britain was going to have short, wet winters and long, roasting summers. ...
They said we were never going to have snow again
, and that we should prepare
for southern England to turn gradually into a Mediterranean world. There
were going to be olive groves in the Weald of Kent, and the whole place was
going to be so generally broiling in summer that no one would be able to
move between noon and 4pm.... That’s what they said: the BBC, and all the respectable meteorologists – and I reckon there were tens of thousands of people who took these prophecies entirely seriously.
They imagined the poolside parties they would have when the warming really kicked in: the barbecues; the bikinis; the pina coladas. They saw themselves on their lilos talking to their brokers on their mobile phones or getting up early on a glorious summer day and diving in unclothed when no one else was around. They thought they were doing the sensible thing and getting ready for a Californian lifestyle – and they were fools! Fools who believed that the global warming soothsayers really meant what they said or that they had a clue what the weather would be in the next 10 years.
I hope I don’t need to tell you that we have not experienced a Mediterranean climate – not since they started to tell us to expect it. On the contrary, we have had some pretty long and miserable winters – including the last one, in which I saw snow settle in London on four separate occasions – and our summer is at risk of becoming a bit of a farce....They now think that we won’t have 10 years of blistering summer heat; on the contrary, it is apparently going to be 10 years of cold and wet.
It is outrageous. Think of all those honest hard-working folk who have sunk their resources into a pool, only to find they use it only a couple of times a summer, and even then the wind-chill is so bad that the swimmers get goosebumps as soon as they emerge. I am generally against the compensation culture, but in my mind’s eye I see a class action: aggrieved English pool-owners against the global warming prophets and the erroneous meteorologists who have, frankly, been taking the piscine." via Lucianne
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3/20/2000, "Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past," Independent UK, Charles Onians
"According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event".
"Children just aren't going to know what snow is," he said."...
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