Whoops! No apocalypse

It had been a while since I had last tuned in to the BBC's flagship "Ten O'Clock News", and when I did last night, I remembered why. Because in spite of World War III developing right in front of our eyes, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the world's financial system collapsing in a snowstorm of paper currency, there was still time for one other major news item. Yes, you guessed it, the terrible world wide plague of plastic shopping bags. With about four news reporters linked by satellite around the world, we licence fee payers received a five minute tirade of blatant Greenpeace propaganda, dressed as news, extolling the virtues of being forced to pay for shopping bags (or being taxed for them - or both!). Apparently, when this happens, the planet will be saved.

Whoever would have thought that by adding about 15 pence to a £150 pounds shopping bill, so much could be achieved for so little? Well, that's the wonder of world government socialism, I suppose.

To follow this major news item, the newscaster adopted a "grave" face and regaled us with some more terrible earth-shattering news, which I only managed to record, alas, with my feeble human memory system. It went something like this:

"And in other news today, environmentalists in Antarctica have discovered that temperatures in the Weddell Sea are much warmer than this time last year."

Such nerve-shredding horror! Obviously, the appalling use of shopping bags by the evil capitalists of the western world is intimately connected with the definite huge warming of the Weddell Sea area, as reported by those uninterested and neutral observers, "some environmentalists", thus linking these two huge stories together. The sheer calamity of it all is terrifying. In fact, I think we should now be taxed for breathing, simply to help stem the tide of this hideousness. Or strangled at birth if we show the slightest signs of "Global Warming Denier" heresy.

And then we had some other news, including the deaths of 30 innocent civilians in Basra, which is immaterial compared to the disastrous reported warming of the Weddell Sea.

But what I find most terrifying, of course, in this wave of evidence about how the entire world requires a world government to police climate change tax and regulation strategy, is how the BBC, despite due diligence, never seems to be able find any stories countervailing this trend; it must be that with no counter-factuals to prove the rule, the evidence is simply overwhelming. We're definitely all going to hell in a 400 degree oven.

Well, apart from the story recently reported in Australia, that the world is actually getting cooler, or at the very least that global temperatures have plateaued in the last decade (which is hardly what you would expect from a galloping greenhouse effect). It was obviously news of no significance to the BBC, or its fleet of jet-set reporters, and thus not worth reporting. Or even investigating. And certainly not worth broadcasting to the millions of licence-fee-paying proles here in England, who are privileged to fund the magnificently independent BBC. Heaven forbid, if we did see such counter-factual evidence, we stupid proles might start getting the idea that we're being lied to the rest of the time.

Mustn't frighten the horses.