What’s the best definition of a scientist? Someone who joins up two dots on a graph and, if they point up, shouts “fire”, if they go down, shrieks, “ice-age”.

It seems we are now on the cusp of a rapid about-face from the former to the latter.

According to an article in the respected, learned journal Nature, global warming is off the agenda, at least for a few hundred-thousand years. The real menace is a vicious ice-age that will cover the eastern side of the British Isles with 6000ft of ice and snow. Even those of us in the warmer west can expect 3000ft of the white stuff.

If you’ve already thrown out your thermal underwear in anticipation of Mediterranean temperatures all year round, well … you should read Syntagma more often. We have been ridiculing the man-made global warmers for a couple of years at least.

Mind you, I doubt the global freeze-up picture too. Mankind has recently demonstrated a very destructive tendency to imagine that if something happens twice in a row it will go on forever, despite a million years’ experience to the contrary.

It comes from an over-reliance on a narrow concept of the intellect. Paranoia is a disease of rationality extended beyond its natural reach. Many people who should know better convince themselves that bad events must be set to continue and, naturally, get much worse. They react by building massive defences and shelters against “the coming storm”.

In reality, things usually switch over to the opposite well before crisis conditions set in — see my piece, Up-To-A-Pointism.

That is, unless a large enough group convince themselves of the worst and, by their actions, prevent the normal turnaround setting in. Almost all economic crises are made worse by economists and politicians. Now, it seems, actions to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere against supposed global warming could precipitate a sudden global cooling of unstoppable proportions.

When eventually the worst doesn’t happen, the “activists” will just find something else to scare the pants off themselves and the rest of us. It’s their nature. Fear is also a bankable commodity these days, especially for the bright sparks seeking government research grants.

Western administrations in the U.S., Europe and Britain, have been frantically creating siege conditions against jihadist terrorism since 9/11, even kicking away the basic freedoms that distinguish our societies from the supposed insurgents’ dismal autocracies. They lose the “war” before firing a shot.

In the UK, politicians mimicking beached sardines, are plotting a kind of Stasi-state right out of Eric Honecker’s East Germany. Individuals you wouldn’t normally trust with assembling a flat-pack whelk stall are building vast databases of the personal data of every individual in the country, backed up by draconian laws. And this is being done “for our own protection”.

Did anyone give them permission to do this? Alas, if it’s not global warming or an ice age coming to get us, it’s a new form of “white slavery”. And the slave masters are materializing from our own political class.

So here’s a word to the scientists. Stop building flummeries in the air from tiny samples of data. Desist from imagining that the 3lb lump of fat and gristle in your skulls knows all there is about everything.

In the meantime we could always redefine mental illness:

Thy name is SCIENCE.

John Evans

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