Gosh I’m enjoying this lovely sunny weather we’ve been having. Aren’t you?

It takes me right back to the last time I can remember England experiencing such a long period of glorious warmth and sunshine: the near-legendary “Summer of ’76”.

Donna Summer and Abba and Chicago were in the charts. Raleigh Choppers and Space Hoppers were all the rage (obviously I had both). The Omen and Taxi Driver were on at the pictures, though I had to hear about them second-hand via my Swedish or German au pair, probably, because they were rated X and I was only 11…

But the main reason that summer sticks out in the memory for all those of us who were there is that it was so very unusual. It was anomalous, to use the technical term.

Summer in England — in Wales and Scotland even more so — is traditionally a very patchy, unpredictable affair. You never know from one day to the next whether it’s going to be croquet and Pimms on a baked lawn or whether the skies are going to open and it’s going to be a washout. That’s how marquee companies make their fortune. That’s why we all book our expensive holidays to the Med because it’s our one guarantee of getting at least a couple of weeks’ vitamin D and suntan.

Everyone with half a brain knows this.

It’s what Shakespeare was on about when he wrote that “Summer’s lease hath all too short a date.”

It’s so obvious, so true, so extensively and thoroughly memorialised in our literature and meteorological records and folk memory, that you’d need to be an absolute moron not to understand this entry-level point: English summers are basically crap; the weather we’re experiencing right now is the exception, not the rule; it’s a joyous relief from years and years and bloody years of otherwise relentless disappointment.

So how thick and warped and demented and addled by stupid, petulant, twisted, anti-human, anti-capitalist, anti-scientific, anti-empirical green groupthink would you have to be to find anything remotely troublesome about this welcome run of delicious balmy heat?

Allow me to show you:

Jeremy Leggett is one of those prominent establishment climate activists — Greenpeace via Oxford — who has made a tidy living from the renewables scam. He has blocked me on Twitter, which is heartbreaking.

Life comes at you fast. pic.twitter.com/v318eYpNbo — Adam Bienkov (@AdamBienkov) July 25, 2018

I’m afraid I don’t know who Adam Bienkov is but the fact that over 6,500 Twitter users found his argument-through-non-sequitur sufficiently persuasive to retweet speaks volumes about the irredeemable fatuousness of the Millennial generation.

We’re not. Climate scientists are very clear that what we’re experiencing now is not just normal fluctuations in weather. https://t.co/IgWN2z6LxR pic.twitter.com/0ATOHegNeM — Adam Bienkov (@AdamBienkov) July 26, 2018

I do know who Myles Allen is. Invoking him as an authority on climate change is a bit like invoking Peter Strzok or Maxine Waters or Antifa Berkeley as your expert witness on Donald Trump. He’s an activist with a very large axe to grind.

Then there’s the egregious Peter Stott of the UK Met Office Hadley Centre:

If you think of climate change as altering the odds of an event – with throwing a six being equivalent in the analogy to having a heatwave – it's as though this year many places around the world have thrown a six unlike in 1976 when many places were colder than average. — Peter Stott (@StottPeter) July 23, 2018

Stott is a virtual nobody — an obscure professor of a questionable field (“Professor of Detection and Attribution of Climate Change at University of Exeter”) with fewer than 4,000 Twitter followers. But he is able to punch far above his weight thanks to the desperation among media organisations, the BBC especially, for tame experts willing to help them ramp up their climate scare narrative.

Here is Stott being thoroughly taken apart by someone who really does know his stuff, Paul Homewood.

Naturally, of course, Stott focuses on the current UK heatwave, noting that it is similar to 1976. While we await the eventual outcome, what is absolutely clear so far is that daily temperatures were far higher in 1976. This is really a serious omission from a supposedly impartial scientist. So far this summer, the highest CET daily max temperature has been 28.6C, with just three days over 28C. In contrast, in 1976 temperatures reached 33.2C, the all-time record, and there were 18 days over 28C in June and July alone. https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/data/download.html While it was consistently hot in June this year, the month only ranked 18th warmest on CET, with the warmest June as long ago as 1846. There is little evidence therefore of anything unprecedented about the weather we have had so far this summer.

There’s more where this came from. As Homewood shows, Stott is wrong on U.S. temperatures too. And the Arctic.

Incidentally, this thing we’re experiencing now feels very much like the “Barbecue Summer” that the Met Office predicted in 2009 — the one that turned out to be a washout because it’s super-duper computer models were actually pretty rubbish.

Like NASA and NOAA, the UK Met Office parted company with honest science quite some time ago, in favour of climate activism.

The Met Office gets very upset when you point this out, as I did here at some length. If its reputation really matters that much to it, perhaps it should consider sticking to its day job — weather forecasting — and leave the climate activism to paid stooges like that bald palaeopiezometrist chap that the Grantham Institute employs to harass sceptical journalists.

Back to my original point: yes this summer has been delightfully dry and hot; yes the summer of ’76 was also delightfully dry and hot.

But what about all the summers in between those 42 years. What about them eh?

To put it another way, if one hot summer is damning proof of global warming, then what conclusion are we to draw from the 40 odd summers which were just kind of meh? Are we just supposed to ignore them because they don’t suit the alarmist narrative?

Well presumably that’s what they’d like us to do, all those Stotts and Harrabins and Bienkovs and Allens and Leggetts — saddoes so bound up and defined by their doomsday Weltanschauung that their only use for a balmy summer is as alarmist tragedy porn.

But I really don’t think we should let them get away with it. By all means let them eat themselves up with their weird, misanthropic obsession, but don’t ever let us allow their problem to become our problem.

It did rather sadden me when an old friend and longtime fellow climate sceptic emailed me the other day to ask: “Do you think maybe they’re right about global warming after all?”

No, I don’t think they’re right.

Indeed, it’s not even that just that I don’t think that they are right. I know they are not right.

Before this long hot summer began, there was no credible real-world evidence that man-made carbon dioxide is causing the planet to warm in a dangerous and/or unprecedented way.

And the fact that we’ve had a nice spell of lovely weather lately hasn’t changed that fact one jot.

Sorry green nutters, but you’re on the own. I hope you go on having a horrible summer because it’s what you deserve. Me, I’m off for a swim…