Disco. don't know much about science

Jan 8, 2010: Bruce Chapman, President of the Discovery Institute: Warming's Alarm-Ringer Stilled by U.K. Chill:

Prime Minister Brown is one of the world's most outspoken alarmists on global warming. He presently is one of the quieter spokesmen on the subject of his freezing country.

Leading to Marginally Shorter Bruce Chapman:

People with fevers don't have cold toes and winter is never cold.

And more importantly to a flashbackâ¦

May 8, 2005, Jonathan Leake, Science Editor of The Times: Britain faces big chill as ocean current slows:

CLIMATE change researchers have detected the first signs of a slowdown in the Gulf Stream â the mighty ocean current that keeps Britain and Europe from freezing.

They have found that one of the âenginesâ driving the Gulf Stream â the sinking of supercooled water in the Greenland Sea â has weakened to less than a quarter of its former strength.

The weakening, apparently caused by global warming, could herald big changes in the current over the next few years or decades. Paradoxically, it could lead to Britain and northwestern and Europe undergoing a sharp drop in temperatures.

Such a change has long been predicted by scientists but the new research is among the first to show clear experimental evidence of the phenomenon.

This is hardly the first time that news from 2005 refutes Chapman's modern blather. But it's a pretty high-profile example, since Al Gore, in his 2006 documentary, talked about how global warming could disrupt the thermohaline current and cause northern Europe to get colder in his Oscar- and Nobel- winning documentary. Climate scientists have been discussing it for a long time, debating whether it was a low-probability event, or if, as this 2005 study found, it is a high-probability event.

None of this is news to non-specialists like myself, or like Berkeley economics professor Brad DeLong, who writes that this graphic is Not Good. Not Good. As you can see in that or any other map, England is farther north than the habitable bits of Canada. People can only live in England year-round because the Gulf Stream bathes the Isles with tropical water. If the Gulf Stream diverts toward the pole rather than toward Europe (breaking the ocean's conveyor belt), England will have to change its name to Iceland. And scientists have been warning for some years now that this exact set of events was a probable result of global warming.
But for Chapman, the whole thing is strange and confusing.