In many rich countries electricity use by appliances which had previously accounted for most usage – white goods such as refrigerators and clothes washers – is falling.

But the growth in use of electronic devices such as iPods, games consoles, TVs and computers has more than offset those falls.

Keep those iPods blasting, I say. Keep that CO2 pumping.  Cover the Arctic with soot.

No, seriously.

For 90% of the last million years, the Earth has been in an ice age. The last ice age started instantaneously about 114,000 years ago, and lasted till about 12,000 years ago. We are due for another one. Now.

Politicians are falling over themselves trying to stop a minor and natural warming, which has stopped anyway and amounted to less than one degree over the last century.

If they had any regard for science and history, they would be preparing us for inevitable, and far more dire for health and production, catastrophic cooling.