150 world leaders gathered in Paris yesterday for the first totally all-world global warming conference. I wasn’t invited. Bit annoying really, as I’ve reduced my carbon footprint to a size 2 and don’t burn any coal whatsoever.

But conference they did. If ‘conference’ can be a verb. Probably is in America. Like ‘golf’.

So the first thing to note was that someone inevitably calculated the carbon cost of getting the 150 most important people in the world together for the day. And its big. Hundreds of private or personal jets, thousands of big, bulky, bullet-proofed limousines chugging out their diesel fumes between airport and meeting. They’d have been better off on video link. The planet would be better off.

Global warming is a ‘thing’. Its a fact. Its a problem. But most of all, its a cause.

And a cause that has to be addressed at a national level. Because we can turn off the central heating for an hour each night to ‘do our bit’ but all you end up with is a wife with freezing cold hands moaning at your concerns for the future of polar bears. You can change your car to a Prius and adopt a suitably smug attitude, but in reality, carbon emissions on a personal level are totally negligible. The major sources of carbon are industry, air travel and taxis.

However, there has actually never been a satisfactory link established between carbon emissions and global warming. Lots of scares, lots of scientific papers, but no causal link.

There are schools in several London boroughs where the pollution is terrible. Above the acceptable limit set by some boffin or other. So our kids are being polluted, which is horrible. But that is a different problem to ‘global warming’. Its localised. The assumption being that local pollution will lead to the polar ice caps melting. But it doesn’t. It just leads to kids getting coughs and colds. And thus is a bad thing. But a different bad thing.

China has the worst pollution in the world. It hangs over their cities day and night like fog. So they are now doing things the Chinese way and building solar ‘farms’ the size of small counties to produce some of the electricity that would formerly be made by fossil fuel. But only some.

India on the other hand have three quarters of their population living without electricity. Not in protest, but because they’ve never had it. And they want it. They just sit there at night watching a blank tv screen. But to produce the electricity they burn coal. Which they have in such abundance that its cheap. Much, much cheaper than any alternative. And the worst thing of all for carbon emissions and pollution.

I don’t know what the answer is. Perhaps that’s why they didn’t invite me. I’m not even sure what the question is any longer.

But whatever: IT MUST STOP. NOW!!! (but what?)

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx