Ah newsdesk, Wembley here.

Sorry about the delay; I’ve been working on a new pamphlet designed to wake the world up to a few stark realities, entitled "Ten things you thought you’d never find out about Global Warming, but you did, causing you to panic for a month or so until you found out it wasn’t true and calmed down, before you picked up a newspaper the following day and read that it actually was true - only for completely different reasons than you were lead to believe in the first place when you read it in that email leak" by Wembley Harris, village correspondent.

Here’s a summary:

1. Global warming started as a practical joke in the 1970s, when American factory engineer Bob Spanks started doctoring thermometers to read one degree higher than the true air temperature.
2. Drunk on the success of his scheme, and by this time slightly bored of the original joke, obsessive Spanks began making increasingly unreliable thermometers, flooding the market with instruments inaccurate to the tune of - in some extreme cases - four degrees.
3. By the late 1980s the world was so full of joke thermometers that no one knew the real temperature.
4. Meanwhile, man-made global warming had been initiated, in reality, by the rise of Progressive Rock Music, which released dangerous amounts of hot noodly waffle into the atmosphere.
5. By 2030 the world will be so full of tosh that most living things won’t care what happens to it.

So that’s five at least. I can’t remember the rest off the top of my head, but that’s the gist of it. The real question is, will anyone listen? Because in the maelstrom of confusion that so recently descended over Denmark, it’s unlikely one man’s message will be heard above the din. Climate change, originally a thing for scientists, has become a thing of leaked emails, crypto-mystery and Chinese whispers; a subject for drunkards, liars and insidious whispering voices in alleyways.

Or in other words, it’s become the subject of the free press.

And the last thing Science needs in this time of crisis is to see the Free Press come staggering into Copenhagen clutching a can of special brew (well Scandinavian prices are ludicrous aren’t they?) with his ugly brute of a dog "News" at his side.

"Don’t worry, he doesn’t bite" slurs the press drunkenly, as Science edges nervously backwards, "you just have to make friends with him."

But no matter how much the Press tries to assure Science that News is absolutely the best thing for sniffing out the facts, there’s something deeply worrying about the look in that animal’s beady black eye.

"Calm down, have a drink", says News, and after half an hour Science and the Press are mumbling drunkenly to each other at the conference bar planning their next child.

But the union is a doomed one. Both industries are filled with too many lunatics saying too many different and strange things, too fast, for anything coherent and useful to be born of the unholy marriage. Sooner or later the pair end up like Keith Richards and Bob Dylan,slumped over a backstage bar at midnight, co-writing a song, having completely forgotten what they were supposed to be doing in the first place..

"You thought global warming was caused by cars and aeroplanes? Think again" sings Science in a nasal drawl... "It’s actually caused by people eating too much meat... no wait, it’s caused by cosmic rays."

"You want the truth?" says the Press, drawing heavily on Malboro Red ... "Global warming doesn’t even exist, man."
Sooner or later News just gets confused and bites someone’s backside.

And then someone will say they always knew News was bad, and everyone will just start talking about how best to deal with News instead of climate change.

Trust me, I’ve seen it happen a hundred times.

Science builds the Hadron Collider; News comesback after a boozy lunch, eats all the protons and tries to fire a kebab down it.

My advice is this; if you want to know the truth about climate change, look somewhere other than a newspaper, like out the window. Unfortunately, my own window view is limited to the one out of the periscope on the top of my new submarine (the camper van was washed away last week) but it’s a good periscope, as you know, and though my craft is currently snagged on the underside of an unadopted sea barge,north of Copenhagen, I have a surprisingly clear picture of the global warming truth.

So, to those of you think global warming is a misnomer masking more complicated climate trends, I would ask you to simply apply the Rule of Duck. Which is to say, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. And I can tell you quite honestly, as I look out my periscope right now, the sight that greets me from the surface is unmistakably... oh hang on....focus lens, adjust periscope... What the hell is that? Oh ho... that actually is a duck! Dear god!...and it's quacking the words to a familiar song...

"it ain’t hard to stumble, and land in some funny lagoon. Especially when it’s nine below zero and three O clock in the afternoon."Or is it Bob Dylan sea-swimming with a duck strapped to its his head? Sometimes the mysteries of nature are best left alone.

Yours

Wembley Harris
A submarine north of Copenhagen