I’m sitting here wondering where my mobile phone is, and how irritated I’m going to be if I have to to ring an expensive UK number just to listen out for the ring. But at least with a mobile (unless the battery’s flat) this method is available as a backup: after a certain age, losing stuff is an hourly occurrence.

What would be great is if you could dial your wallet, glasses, car keys and pens. Or if you could be a magnetic pied piper for everyday useful stuff, so it was forced to follow you around. Talking of which, Chris Huhne is following me on Twitter. Should I alert the Met Police, or will they leak it to the media? All is moral dilemma and ethical algebra in 2013.

Maybe prison’s the right place for Mr Huhne to hide – given the dire economic and fiscal outlook facing the Coalition fast-lane of which he was once a part. I hear that Jeremy Hunt has come up with the idea of putting the clocks forward an hour every day from now on. This way we will get to the future before anyone else, and recover the global domination we once had. There is a script in production from Darryl Shiteberg at the Burbank studios of Maestro-Goldscam-Mire, working title Forward to the Past – the uplifting tale of how Michale Gove and Jeremy Taiping-Errah boldly took us back to 1935.

Soon (I imagine) you’ll be able to do A-level chimney sweeping from the age of eight, and thus prove what an advanced education system Britain has, now it’s in the hands of the Conservatives again. And if that might sound like club-footed Leftie standup stuff, be in no doubt that the  braindead and otherworldly ideas of the Miliband of Hope would almost certainly be even worse: what their forebears gave us was four million kids with a 2:2 in media studies, but nobody who could actually do anything useful – like wiring, plumbing, and woodwork. Or measuring coefficients of heat loss, calculating a roof’s load-bearing capacity for solar panels, and perhaps even read some climatic trend data.

And that last point, dear reader, is what brings me to this evening’s topic for heated debate: climate change. What our education system under Nude Labour spewed out was a howling mob of Coliseum regulars able to go globalwarminclimatechangegreenhouse roughly aligned with CO2methanegascarbonfootprint in the manner I dubbed Estuary Ecology some time back. (In ‘estuary pc’ syntax, by the way, the equivalent is “intodayzmulculchsietee thassoutofoh-dah, roit?”). But the one thing all these Speak-Your-Weight machines have in common is about as much understanding of what they’re blethering on about as a parrot of slightly above-average intelligence.

That doesn’t make them dumb, it makes them ignorant. Face it people, most people are ignorant about climate change.

Now much as I loathe Greenpeace (cynically rebranded Hard Left Hairies who once took my agency for £280,000) I also have a problem with the Old Tories and the enfant terrible Right, whose general line of approach is to obsess about the word ‘warming’ and the University of East Anglia, and then leap wildly towards the conclusion that all climate change concerns are bollocks.

The childishly unscientific nature of this is an old trick, but boy has it worked. And the leader of this plough-on-regardless UKip-think approach to the subject is James Delingpole. I like James, let us not knock ‘im: he has, after all, put thousands of hairy and dishonest academic trouble-makers back in their well deserved solitary confinement. His brother Dick is, well, hard to take 90% of the time, but Delingpole J I like: he’s got a lovely argument for the role of debunker. I’ve got nothing against it. That’s the problem – neither has he.

That short homage to the immortal duo of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore is designed to suggest that, taken in the round, Delingpole is something of a one-legged Tarzan. His approach is fine until you kick his shin; then he falls over. And he falls over bigtime when you say to him things like, “F**k the CO2 warmist crap James, what about the Gulf Stream?” Or “Very funny James, but what’s the harm in taking out insurance just in case you’re wrong?”

Here comes the science bit: the Gulf Stream is not where it should be at the minute. Beginning in the Caribbean and ending in the northern North Atlantic, this extensive western boundary current plays an important role in the poleward transfer of heat and salt, and serves to warm the European subcontinent. Relative Gulf Stream velocity fields are studied via near-realtime data from the radar altimeters of the satellites Envisat, Jason-1, and Jason-2. If you want to keep up to date with where it is, this site is as good as any.

Something – there are only about 5,910 hypotheses – has caused the northern jet stream to become unstable and start to wobble in a way that is unusual. Of course, it’s only unusual to us….ie, those lucky few who, in recent years, have had satellites to watch it wobble – and thus get stressed about it. The problem with most climate change fanatics is that their geological timescale is ludicrously short: 10 million years ago, north Wales went from being a swamp to a three-hundred foot deep iceberg and then back again in the relative blinking of an eye.

However, the thing I can never get denialists to grasp is that a geological eye-blink is thirty generations of humanity: sure, sh*t happens, and it’s very rarely sh*t that hasn’t happened before: but we have to deal with it. Witty columns dissing half-baked drivellers in the New York Times are unlikely to cut the mustard. The scientific reality is that if stream-wobbling continues and worsens, it could lead to the collapse of the jet stream.

Now being parochial here for a minute, when the second ice age ended about 20,000 years ago, the ice started melting in the Alps and the southern margins of the European continental ice sheet, and by about 12,000 years ago it was quite warm. But then the temperature collapsed for about 700 years—the Younger Dryas period—because melt water from the North American ice sheet weakened the Gulf Stream. So here we have a scientific record, denialists: it’s a bad idea to f**k with the Gulf Stream. Do so, and the temperature plummets. And frankly, I don’t give a jumping Jeehossaphat whose fault it is…for all I know it’s nothing to do with shale fracking in the US or coal generators outside Shanghai. It could be penguin urine that’s doing it: I just want to know what we can do about it.

Is there anything to do anything about? Well, here we are in 2013 and this much I can tell you: without the Gulf Stream, we Brits and most of the French would have a climate like northern Canada. A slowdown of the Gulf Stream and ocean circulation in the future, induced by freshening of the waters caused by anthropogenic climate change (via melting glaciers and increased water vapor transport into high latitudes) would introduce what climatologists would dub ‘a modest cooling tendency’. But being selfish, I’m British with a domicile in France, and if I’d wanted to live in northern Canada, I’d have bloody well moved there.

Modest cooling is enough to have delivered me into four layers of clothing in April when just five years ago I would’ve been in shorts and long-sleeved tee-shirts by now down here in south-west France. It has also (see pic left) made an enormous hole in my woodstore in just seven weeks. This kind of stuff matters, James Delingpole: springing immediately to mind are things like log burner sales, clothing formulations, tree-felling, lawnmower marketing, sun-cream sales, a reversion to pyjamas, the price of Butagaz, double-glazing, thermal insulation standards, agricultural crop planning, and sales of spirits to old blokes stuck inside 18th century, draughty French former hunting lodges.

Now I have no pretensions when it comes to what we do about it. I just think it would be a good idea to recognise it and think about it….rather than keep repeating that it’s a load of old bollocks.

According to the long range weather forecasts (yes alright, I know – hahahaha) we’re going to get the same next Spring. That would make four cold Springs in a row down here. Two more like that, and my farming neighbours will stop planting maize. Indeed, winter wheat has already become a more popular (and reliable) crop in my little corner of the world.

Far too much of the argument about climate change is triumphalist wanking. We see clear evidence of the Gulf Stream out of sync followed by very cold weather (exactly what you’d expect) and along comes another Certainty Cecil saying actually, atmospheric change is infinitely more important and screw the Gulf Stream. It is therefore a mathematical certainty that some people are going to be wrong, and possibly dead as a result of it. I’ve no desire to be right and dead because of their arrogance.I’d like to see less playing to the gallery, a lot more open-minded maturity, and more evidence of thinking for oneself rather than robotic camp-following.

What I’d ideally like is some form of quadratic equation involving both sides that leaves a QED residue we can all sign up to. And then prepare for it.

Are we so unable to agree on empirical reality now that this is too much to ask?