Have you read the final paragraph of the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s announcement on the award of the Nobel Peace Prize (see also: An IgNobel Prize, October 13) to Our Albert Arnold (Al) Gore? It is hubristic nonsense:

“By awarding the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 to the IPCC and Al Gore, the Norwegian Nobel Committee is seeking to contribute to a sharper focus on the processes and decisions that appear to be necessary to protect the world’s future climate, and thereby to reduce the threat to the security of mankind. Action is necessary now, before climate change moves beyond man’s control.”

Has climate ever been under human control? Such dangerous rubbish is quite extraordinary, and it reveals the mighty conceit of the age, namely the very idea that we can control climate predictably. I thus await with interest the sight of Our Al capping volcanoes, correcting the axis of the Earth, dimming solar sun spots, and diverting the ocean currents and cosmic rays.

In his masterpiece, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), Samuel Johnson tells us about an Astronomer who declaims that he can control climate:  “...the sun has listened to my dictates, and passed from tropic to tropic by my direction; the clouds, at my call, have poured their waters...”

Unfortunately, Johnson points out that the Astronomer was mad. And we are too if we give such arrogance credence.

So, come back King Canute. Old Cnut (above) was noble enough to stand before the sea precisely to show his fawning courtiers that even He, a Mighty King, could not control the wind and the waves.

On ‘global warming’, our political classes have lost leave of their senses. Has it dawned on folk that, in so complex a system, doing something and not doing something with one variable at the margins are equally unpredictable? What precise climate do our politicians think they would like to produce for us?

One just groans. This is indeed an infantile hubris too far.