Alarming the punters has always been a lucrative source of income for newspapers. There’s no news like bad news.

So it is no surprise to see the Norwich-based Eastern Daily Press – the biggest selling English regional paper – going to town on the threat to local post offices and to Norfolk villages abandoned to the sea. These are worthy subjects for a local newspaper, and both post offices and villages have my unconditional support. The EDP is doing a fine job in exposing their plight.

The post offices are in what might be described as a unique position, in that their probable demise is not being attributed to global warming. Possibly the connection has been overlooked. The cliff-edge villages of course are a different matter, though they share with the post offices a quite different and common cause: idiotic government policies. It might be amusing to speculate how the Government might top these two dunderheaded plans – perhaps they have a secret scheme to abolish villages altogether and pile everyone into a few massive metropolises where they can be carefully monitored.

If so, the EDP will tell us in due course. But at the moment they are just telling us that the villages are threatened because the sea level is rising. Those of you fortunate enough to visit Great Yarmouth on a regular basis will no doubt have noticed this. Others may suspect that erosion is an ongoing natural process that has nothing to do with rising sea levels.

But what about the Antarctic? The EDP thinks we should be concerned about this – so much so that it devoted pages two and three to the collapse of an ice shelf not long ago, together with a huge picture of what appeared to be ice of some kind. This is not the kind of thing one sees too much around Norfolk, but of course it could be heading this way. And it’s all to do with climate change, isn’t it?

Well, no, actually it isn’t. Ice does this sort of thing all the time. The ice shelf involved is one of many surrounding the Antarctic Peninsula, which itself represents just two per cent of the Antarctic land mass, and a still smaller proportion of its ice mass. I am told that “the seven ice shelves that have already disintegrated on the Antarctic Peninsula represent a combined area 1/55 the size of Texas”.

In the last 50 years the Antarctic as a whole has been cooling. This is not mentioned much by the media, which also rarely points out that melting ice shelves do not add an inch to sea level, because the ice is already floating. If sea level rises this century it is unlikely to be by more than the eight inches observed in the 20th century. Even the IPCC says says sea level will rise by 20ft only after several millennia.

So let’s get protecting those threatened villages (and their post offices). And while we’re at it, let’s note another couple of significant pieces of news that don’t seem to have reached the pages of the EDP – or many other parts of the media.

First, the earth is no longer warming. From 1998 it has actually cooled. From 2002, it has plateaued. This is not in dispute: the IPCC admits it. Since carbon dioxide levels are still increasing this is a bit puzzling – but only if you blame CO2 for warming.

Second, data from NASA’s Aqua satellite, launched in 2002, has supplied data that contradicts computer climate models and reveals that the climate has actually been compensating for the increased carbon dioxide and limiting the greenhouse effect.

Some might think this is worth bringing to people’s attention. But of course if global warming is not what has been suggested, a lot of people are going to look pretty silly. Some might even lose their jobs or businesses. The highly dubious practice of carbon trading would be rendered pointless, and environmental correspondents would have a few things to explain.

Headlines like “Switch off to save the earth” and pointless gimmicks like Earth Hour, in which gullible people switched off their power for an hour as some kind of symbol, would be exposed. Needless to say, Norwich was one of the first UK cities to sign up for this ludicrous event, though when I looked out of the window during the critical hour I didn’t see an awful lot of darkness. Maybe people have more sense than they are sometimes credited with. I suspect they do.

When there is no coherent argument, and thinking takes too much time, abuse comes easily to the editorial pen. Which explains why the Norwich-based Eastern Daily Press is happy to describe those who challenge its views on climate change as “fools and extreme reactionaries”. This immoderate language is not typical of the paper when it is discussing anything other than climate change, but the politically correct view of that subject seems close to an article of faith for the editorial movers and shakers at Prospect House. Hence the reaction to any other possibility as if it were blasphemy.

We are used to seeing one-sided coverage of the subject in the EDP, together with apparent ignorance of the distinguished scientists – many of them climate scientists and meteorologists – who doubt the extent of human influence on the climate that is conveniently accepted by politicians. The paper does have an environmental specialist, but if she has done any serious research into the subject, it doesn’t show.

The paper gives opportunity to various environmental activists to propagate their views without allowing any effective response: handily, it has a policy of using very short letters to the editor, which gives it the opportunity to cut any reasoned argument right down. This was once described to me as “the rough and tumble of debate”. One of its sister weeklies recently axed discussion of a lively debate on wind turbines abruptly at a point when a particularly weak argument in favour went unanswered, leaving the impression on non-experts that it was unanswerable.

The EDP itself gives frequent opportunities to a local professor and city councillor who has no qualifications in climate science – or anything closer to it than Wittgenstein – to launch attacks on those who want a serious debate. He doesn’t even think the term “climate change” should be used, instead painting a picture of imminent catastrophe and wanting to charge all the expense of putting it right to the energy companies through a retrospective tax.

Retrospective tax is always wrong. It’s like setting a new speed limit and then fining people for exceeding it last year. It is the kind of thing dictators do, especially when they themselves decide what “putting it right” involves. Such people tend to have a particularly frail grasp of what “right” is. Or what climate change involves.

I have not seen any report in the EDP on the 40-page report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, which concludes that “nature, not human activity, rules the climate”; nothing about the fact that global temperatures for the last year have fallen by more than half a degree Celsius; nothing about the effect on climate change of cosmic rays, clouds and sunspot cycles, all of which have serious scientific support. Or maybe those who research these things are all fools and reactionaries? How useful to be able to write them off like that.

I would suggest to the EDP, of which I am fond, having been employed there for 30 years, that they get a grip. If they stepped back for a better view, they might be surprised to find out just how many of their readers find their views on climate change, and blind acceptance of the government line on similar issues, to be quite repugnant. Circulation is falling: could that be one of the reasons?

They should concentrate a bit more perhaps on the basics of accuracy, as well as grammar. Recently they published a picture of the Bishop of Norwich in place of a murderer, which the Bishop took with characteristic good humour. Others might have required huge financial compensation. Today we have the punchy headline “Where us law-abiding people fear to tread”. Do us really? Us should take steps to improve.

The climate change bandwagon depends for its progress on an engine powered by journalists and scientists. Unfortunately, both professions have taken a bit of a knock recently. Under the headline “The myth of the noble scientist”, an article by Terence Kealey, vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham, suggests that peer review in key journals can easily become a closed shop. “If a well-known scientist submits a paper, it will probably be accepted; if an unknown submits one, it will probably be rejected.”

He cites the case of Barbara McClintock, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1983, who could not get her original research on gene jumping published in prestige journals because she could not get peer reviewers to accept it.

Establishment science tends to be conservative: once a theory is accepted, it is stuck to like glue – hence the difficulty in getting radical ideas about the climate in print. “Peer review was always an illusion,” says Mr Kealey.

Philosophically, this is probably because scientists, like the rest of us, behave rather like sheep. An experiment carried out by researchers at Leeds University found that people will blindly follow “one or two individuals who seem to know where they are going”.

Even if they don’t.

Journalists are like that too – perhaps even more than most people, and much more now than used to be the case.

Young people want to become journalists because they like the idea of investigating to find out the truth. But of course it’s not like that. As Sam Leith reminds us in a review of Flat Earth News, by Nick Davies, “Untruths pass into common currency not because journalists are liars, but because they simply do not know whether what they are writing is true and do not have time to find out.”

The quote is from Mr Davies, who says that journalism has become “churnalism”. As such it is “exceptionally vulnerable to manipulation”. This, of course, suits the green machine down to the ground, because it knows how to make something sound right, and how to paint opponents as demons.

As so often, the wise cannot get their wisdom across, and would-be dictators get a ready audience.

Round the world

The EDP’s environment correspondent, never one to avoid a cliche, tells us that four “intrepid travellers” are visiting six countries on the “trip of a lifetime” with “one topic on their minds – climate change”.

Bravely emitting carbon as they go, they will take in America, Brazil, Mexico, Bhutan, China and Japan. I hope they notice that China is in the grip of its worst winter for 100 years, and parts of America have just had 70 inches of snow.

Maybe they could take a couple of detours and register that sea ice between Canada and Greenland is the most voluminous it has been in the last 15 years, Iran has had its worst snowfall in living memory, and Greece and Turkey are under several feet of snow.

It’s been a bit chilly here in England, too. Not really, really cold, but cold enough to stop a bus. If the bus is running on biodiesel, that is.

Eleven Norwich buses were put out of action when the temperature crept below freezing, which doesn’t bode well if the global warming enthusiasts are wrong and the chilling stars scientists are right.

But reassurance is at hand. A spokesman for the producers of the biodiesel said it was OK – they knew that cold “does have a specific effect”. I wonder if they told the bus company what the specific effect was.

Anyway, not to worry. “People certainly shouldn’t be put off using biofuels. They have a number of very good properties.” Bit vague, isn’t he? I wonder if the good properties outweigh the fact that the buses won’t actually start when it gets chilly. We might try doing surveys at a few bus stops. The promised compensation should do it. Coupled with the increased fares to pay for it.

I made that last bit up. I’m sure the bus company won’t be increasing fares.