Somerset Notebook

When we looked out of the window last Sunday morning to see thick snow blotting out the Mendip hills above our Somerset village, I’m afraid I immediately thought: ‘The Gore Effect.’ The previous evening, I had been reading how poor Al Gore had belatedly jumped on the latest warmist bandwagon by ascribing Storm Sandy to global warming. It was in 2004 that climate sceptics first noted the Gore Effect when his visits to Boston and New York to preach his warming gospel coincided with the lowest temperatures those cities had known for half a century. In 2006, his tours of New Zealand and Australia to promote An Inconvenient Truth coincided with abnormal snowfalls, including the first seen in Queensland for 65 years. A visit to Italy in December 2008 brought freak snow as far south as Sicily. In 2009, when he testified on global warming to the Senate, blizzards closed Washington schools.