It’s been a warm few days, and so all those predictions that would normally be frozen and probably buried at this time of year have come to the surface and sprouted alarmingly.
Because it’s been so warm, and it’s still February (at the time of writing), this means we will have a warm summer, like 1976. Or it could be that we will have a cool, damp summer, so that things even out.
Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion, has reminded us that if we are shown a number of high temperatures – preferably accompanied by pictures – and are then asked how warm it will be, our answers will be higher than if we weren’t shown anything.
I am paraphrasing slightly. If you want the full story, buy Deep Thinking, his excellent book on Artificial Intelligence and Human Creativity, in which he also says that weather forecasters are no more likely to affect the weather than economists are to affect the economy.
In a nutshell this more or less summarises my theory of climate change, which is that the climate changes.
This is not a prediction I would make if it were a normal February, but it seems appropriate in the circumstances. What is undeniable is that since I am about to have a weekend away in Derbyshire, it won’t be warm for much longer.
That is by far the most common way that humans influence the climate. For some reason Mr Kasparov doesn’t mention this in his book.