Global warming, the religion of recycling and bloody bin day...

 I don’t think I’ve written much about Global Warming. I’ve mentioned it in passing, but I’ve never had an all out writing rant about it. So here goes…

It seems that the inconvenient truth of global warming has rather inconveniently stopped just as everybody had begun to buy into it. According to newspaper reports the world's top climate scientists have been told to ‘cover up’ the fact that the Earth's temperature hasn't risen for the last 15 years. A report, to be published soon, is expected to address the fact that 1998 was the hottest year on record and world temperatures have not yet exceeded it.

The scientists have so far struggled to explain why this is and politicians in Belgium, Germany, Hungary and the United States have raised concerns about the final draft. Of course they would do wouldn’t they? After all global warming is a big money spinner, allowing them to up the price of energy, petrol and bung loads of ‘green’ taxes on all manner of things from factory emissions to holidays abroad.

It’s all part of the new recycling religion which so many people have taken to with the fervour of doomed Christians about to be fed to the lions…

Praise be the green bin,

Praise be the grey bin,

Praise be the black bin,

Praise be the blue bin

And all the waste caddies

For ever and ever,

Amen

Amen indeed, just how many bins do I need anyway? I have four big bins and two caddies, need a degree to understand when and which bins to put out, and I spend an awful lot of time separating my rubbish into cardboard/paper, tins/glass/plastic, garden/food waste and non-recyclable. When I go to the tip there are at least ten skips for various waste types – metal, clothes, cardboard, wood, electrical appliances, batteries, computer screens and televisions, oil, rubble - the list goes on and on, a quick trip to the tip usually taking upwards of an hour.

Now don’t get me wrong, even without global warming recycling and waste reduction is a good thing. But it’s a bit of a worry when the authorities monitor what you put in your bin and charge and fine if you bin incorrectly.

Hardly surprisingly there are bins everywhere. Walking along my road this morning was like running a particularly smelly obstacle course. Discarded and forgotten plastic wheelie bins were everywhere. Bin day was Wednesday, so just why there were still so many bins around is a mystery particularly as some of them were black and blue and it was green and grey week… I think.

Of course, whole industries have sprung up around global warming. Just how many solar panels did you see on the roofs of semi-detached houses ten or fifteen years ago? And even Michael Fish wouldn’t have gone to watch a movie about the weather prior to global warming.

Most of us think that the weather is changing and that it has something to do with CO2 emissions - but is it really? The Romans made wine from grapes grown in vineyards in Lincolnshire, less than two hundred years ago you could skate on the Thames, and I remember hot, hot summers and cold, cold winters when I was a child over fifty years ago. Back then most households only had one bin and recycling hadn’t even been invented. Mind you, we returned our glass bottles, reused jam jars, carried groceries in wicker shopping baskets and ate all the food we bought because waste was a sin and food wasn’t cheap.

I don’t know if the globe is warming or not. I know that I think the climate is changing, but I’m not sure. All I can do is listen to what the experts report. You know the ones I mean. The ones that told me that my computer would grind to a halt when the clock edged into the year 2000, the ones that were telling us just fifty years ago that cigarettes were good for us, the ones that told us that the world was flat and the sun revolved around the earth.