With or without global warming, Britain is disappearing into the sea. We must invest more in coastal and river defences
I have an idea for saving public money: replace the Department for Energy and Climate Change with one man and a sandwich board carrying the words: ‘Prepare to Meet Thy Doom’. It shouldn’t cost much
more than £40 a day to pay for him to pace up and down Oxford Street. And it would achieve exactly the same as DECC: constantly reminding us of the grim warnings regularly put out by
ministers – while doing sweet Fanny Adams to save us.
Maybe that is just a tad unfair. We do, after all, have the new Committee of Climate Change, established by the Climate Change Act 2008, which last week published its report ‘How Well Prepared is
the UK for Climate Change?’ As is common with these kinds of documents it trots out the familiar scary predictions and somewhat dubious statistics: we are told, for example, that average
temperatures in Britain have risen by 1°C since the 1970s – which is hard to square with another little factlet provided: globally, temperatures have only risen by 0.8°C
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