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. Gore himself stayed away from that year’s mammoth Copenhagen climate conference, a fiasco compounded when the city was carpeted in six inches of snow. But the Gore Effect’s greatest triumph came four years ago last week when, as MPs were about to vote almost unanimously for the Climate Change Bill, the maddest and most expensive law ever passed by parliament, Peter Lilley drew the House’s attention to the fact that, outside in Parliament Square, London was seeing its first October snow in 74 years.
The disgrace of Denis MacShane, the relentlessly Europhile MP forced to resign after claiming £12,500 from the taxpayer on invoices forged by himself from a non-existent European Policy Institute, has raised two puzzles. One is why the CPS cannot prosecute him for fraud, because his own admission of guilt is allegedly protected by parliamentary privilege.
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