I must issue an urgent climate change warning. This week Boscombe Down in Wiltshire suffered its coldest September night, at -1C, since 1931. This is serious, chilling even. We are plunging precipitously towards the next Ice Age and the Government must act now. Not to do so would be a mammoth mistake. We need more carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere as quickly as possible. Just think what will happen to all our wildlife, frozen in its burrows or fossilised in ice blocks along with our orc-like wind farms. And the poor purple emperor butterfly will have to go and live in Italy under S. Berlusconi. Cold comfort for us all.

“But what about the searing heat of August?”, I can hear your brains whirring. Sadly, in the end, even blazing August proved a bit of a let down. On the 30th and 31st, the temperature at Biggar in Scotland fell to 1C, clearly a harbinger of the “Boscombe Down Freeze”. And when you look at the month as a whole — through what we inelegantly call the Mean Temperature Series, which began only in 1961 — August was unimpressive.

In Scotland, August proved to be only the fourth warmest and the third driest, while in England and Wales it was again only the fourth warmest, although it did crack the turf as the second driest (hence those tricky pitches for the thrilling Test Matches with South Africa). Mind you, English wines are set to have a bumper harvest with a vintage to beat the French. “Cheers!” all round.

“But what of that Gravesend temperature record of 38.1C on August 10?” you hotly contest. Unfortunately, there are even problems with that. As a spokesman from the Met Office said: “The reason that Gravesend is the hottest place in the country is to do with the soil and the heat it radiates from the ground.”

Indeed, the Gravesend site is on sandy clay, sheltered by an embankment, and surrounded for miles by massive exposures of white chalk, mainly gouged out for the new Ebbsfleet railway station. In addition, modern temperature instruments react quickly and record more extreme transitory highs, so we have no idea how to compare these recent temperatures with older highs, such as the 36.1C recorded at Camden Square, London, in 1911.

“But what of the floods of 2002?” you continue to gush. A superb new study has shown us that the European floods of 2002 were nothing special either, even those that afflicted the art and architecture of Dresden and Prague. Work in Germany on more than 1,000 years of floods analysed no fewer than 328 flood events on the Elbe, which flows from the Czech Republic to the North Sea and which was responsible for some of the worst of the 2002 flooding. The research uncovered no trend at all in summer floods, while winter floods appear to be less frequent.

And this is the point. Relating climate change to just a few sets of weather events, whether floods, drought, heat, or cold, is dangerous nonsense. Even worse, it distracts us from the fact that many such events have purely local causes that need to be addressed now on the ground. At the lovely East Sussex town of Lewes, for example, the floods were part of a long-term cycle of Sussex flooding, now exacerbated by the thinning of the soils on the surrounding Downs, the curse of concrete car parks, and over-canalised rivers.

For politicians “Saving the World” is easy rhetoric; putting money and effort into urgent flood defences is somewhat more demanding. We must not allow the myths of “global warming” or of “global cooling” to cover up dumb planning. Just what is going to happen to those 120,000 houses designated for the Thames tidal flood plain, I wonder?

The author is Professor Emeritus of Biogeography at the University of London