The weather is cold and snowy in Britain just now - even, now, in central London - but people like Richard North are actually quite enjoying this:

It is global warming here again, and it is getting serious. It is not so much the depth, as the repeated falls. Each layer compacts and freezes which, with fresh global warming on top becomes lethally slippery.

Time was, what with the AGW crowd pretty much completely controlling the agenda, when this kind of elegant mockery would be dismissed as the ignorance of the uninitiated. But the fact is that the present wintry weather is extremely significant in this debate. True, the weather today is not the climate for the next century, but sooner or later weather does turn into climate, and the weather has, from the AGW point of view, been misbehaving for a decade. Their precious Hockey Stick said that the temperature of the globe would disappear off the top right hand corner of the page, right about now. Well it hasn't, has it?

As John Redwood recently asked Ed Miliband in the House of Commons, concerning the present very cold weather:

... which of the climate models had predicted this?

None, it quickly became clear from Mr Miliband's faltering reply, that Mr Miliband has been paying any attention to (although other sorts of models have predicted cold winters rather successfully).

But this is not just about looking out of the window and seeing if global warming is to be observed or not (as Richard North well understands). The other point here is the authority of the people upon whom people like Ed Miliband have been relying. Not only have none of Miliband's "experts" (sneer quotes entirely deliberate) been able to predict the recent succession of colder winters; it goes way beyond that. The point is: these experts assured the world, or allowed their more ignorant followers to assure the world, that these cold winters would not happen, and despite all their protestations now about how weather is not climate, well, shouldn't they have born this in mind when saying, only a few short years ago, and have been repeating ever since, that winter snow in places like Britain would be a thing of the past? Should they not have been more careful about seizing upon any bursts of warm weather, any bursts of weather of any kind, come to that, as evidence of the truth of global warming? Had they truly understood the point that they have been reduced to making now, they would have been a lot more modest in their recent, and in Britain economically disastrous, medium range predictions. See also, John Redwood's follow up posting. Redwood is now talking more sense about the world's climate than the British Met Office.

Forgive me for always banging on about that other Cold War whenever I write about Climategate, but I truly believe that these comparisons are relevant. Much the same people were locked in combat then as are now, and the same economically catastrophic policies are being argued for and against then as now, the big difference being that now it is the entire global economy that is being threatened with economic derangement, which means that the world won't now, as the deranging tendency well knows, be able to make the obvious and damning comparisons that it could make then.

Meanwhile, the AGW debate has arrived at the same position that the Cold War argument had arrived at in or around about 1970 to 1980. An informed minority of pro-economic-progress critics had won the academic argument against the pro-economic-derangement academics, and word of this victory was spreading. And a particular thing that happened then is starting to happen now, which is that even intelligent layman critics of the John Redwood (and Brian Micklethwait) variety are starting to understand the details of the argument better than even the very smartest of the pro-derangement scientists, of the sort who are still advising governments, or who are still receiving and still trying still to believe this advice. It's not that these "experts" were born stupid, nor that they are now ignorant. Nor is Ed Miliband stupid, even if, what with all the other things on his mind, I suspect him of still being fairly ignorant. The climate science "experts" still know far more mere facts about this debate than John Redwood does, or than I do. It is simply that these people have now said - and nailed their egos to - too many stupid things, too many non-facts, and there is now no sensible way out for them. It's what these "experts" still insist on saying they know, but that clearly ain't so, that is hanging them all out to dry. The science, they keep saying, still, is settled. In their dreams.

I remember when I and my fellow anti-Marxists began correcting self-declared Marxists, who suddenly found themselves as a result on the theoretical defensive, about what Karl Marx himself had actually said. Communism is fine in theory, they then said, retreating hurriedly, but it just didn't work quite so well in practice. No, said we, pressing forward some more, a theory that doesn't work "in practice" is called an untrue theory, a bad theory, and anyone who persists in following it is stupid, and by and by: evil. And so on. So it is now with AGW. Okay, I might not now be able to demolish the sinister and preposterous Michael Mann in a television studio, but give me another few months, weeks even, of reading the skeptic blogs and I surely could.

Then as now, the mainstream media were very reluctant to report what had become obvious then, and is gradually becoming obvious now. But despite there being no internet then, the obvious economic inferiority of communism was nevertheless reported and did get around, in the form of capitalist stuff galore and adverts galore for yet more capitalist stuff galore, and nothing but jokes and complaints about the communist stuff. Not even journalists could fail to observe in which direction the Berlin Wall was pointing, and which side built it. Now the word about the fraudulence of the AGW crowd is also getting out, in the form of misbehaving weather, and, despite the best efforts of most of the regular journalists, via the internet.

The next step is to destroy - or at least try to cut down to size - the various Evil Empires that have been erected upon the fraudulent foundations of the AGW argument, as Richard North also well understands.