As global warming pushes temperatures up, more people will die in heat waves; a point emphasized by campaigners like UN climate chief, Christiana Figueres. What we don’t hear from her is that fewer people will die from cold. One study for England and Wales shows that heat kills 1,500 annually and cold kills 32,000. By the 2080s, increased heat-waves will kill nearly 5,000 in a comparable population. But ‘cold deaths’ will have dropped by 10,000, meaning 6,500 fewer die altogether.

Only mentioning the negatives distorts and degrades the political conversation. Any reasonable person can recognize both positives and negatives among the policy proposals of both Tories and Labour. It is an extreme partisan that insists either side offers only negatives.

Yet, this is the position enforced by the climate alarmists – last seen in a letter to The Times from Lord Krebs and company, essentially telling the newspaper to stop reporting less-than-negative climate stories. While it is true any individual news story rarely represents the whole truth, it is revealing that such campaigners don’t send out similar letters to correct the daily deluge of alarmist stories.

The idea that climate is bad for all good things and good for all bad things belongs in a morality play. In the real world, we should look at all the available information. When the BBC warns of more severe tropical storms, it has some validity. The UN’s climate panel expects to see fewer but stronger hurricanes. But it is an incomplete picture.