Even the freezing weather failed to bring cold reality home to the global warming posse in Cancun.
It is probably fair to say that, in the real world, the need to fight runaway global warming was not at the top of most people’s agenda last week. The Central England Temperature record, the oldest in the world, showed the last week of November and the first of December as the coldest ever recorded since the measurements began in 1659. North of the border, Scotland’s First Minister, Alex Salmond, had to call in the Army as much of his country ground to a halt in up to three feet of snow.
None of this, however, remotely concerned the warmists, who were in fuller cry than ever. In the Mexican resort of Cancun (where, for six days running, local temperatures also fell to their lowest, for the date, since records began 100 years ago) Lord Stern, that high priest of the international warmist establishment, proposed that Britain should raise an extra £15 billion a year in “green taxes”, on petrol, flights and domestic energy, to punish people with a “high-emission lifestyle” for the damage they do to the environment. Ten per cent of this, said Lord Stern, could go to the new Green Climate Fund (agreed late on Friday, to a standing ovation) to help poorer countries develop “low carbon economies” by building wind turbines and solar panels, while the rest could be kept by the British Government as an “incentive”.