A better illustration of the difference between having the Gulf Stream flow over Northern Europe and not might be to compare London (latitude 51°32′ N) with Waskaganish, formerly known as Fort Rupert, in Quebec (latitude 51°30′ N). Wikipedia informs me that it’s a Cree village of about 2000 people on the south-east shore of James Bay, itself an inlet of Hudson Bay. London would be just as obscure without the Gulf Stream – no disrespect intended to the inhabitants of Waskaganish, but they have to admit that few have heard of them. I doubt that Littlejohn has.

I would take a little issue with the assertion at the end that anthropogenic climate change will cause Britain to have colder winters. One of the subtleties of global warming (that often gets lost in the shrillness the debate always seems to descend to), is that it’s very easy to say that a massive input of carbon to the ocean-atmosphere system in a short time could affect significant changes to the climate, but very difficult to make any prediction as to what that difference would be. This is due to the climate being part of a chaotic system (not a random system, that’s something altogether different), with lots of positive and negative feedbacks that work in different ways, on different timescales.

Of course, this is in no way what the public want to hear, which is that something we can clearly determine is definitely going to happen unless we take clearly defined measures for a clearly defined time. and there is no way to offer that level of certainty.