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Don't touch it with a barge pole

All schoolchildren know the story of Archimedes immersing himself in his bathtub and watching the water rise up the sides, then jumping up and running naked down the street yelling ‘eureka’.

His discovery was that when a solid is partially immersed, the quantity of liquid displaced equals the portion of the solid that is immersed, and the rise of the level is in proportion.

Over 2000 years later in 1885, in another eureka moment, Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland and Deacon of Mathematics at Oxford University, outlined in his "Balbus's Essay" - how a mathematical series only starts and stops where we stipulate, but has no beginning or end so is not mathematically finite.

You can see this infinite-ism when you position two mirrors facing each other.

And in a strictly mathematical world (nowadays described by computer models), one side of an equation can follow the other in an endless spiral.

Suppose, said Carroll recalling Archimedes, that you dip the end of a long thick stick in a bucket of water. The water displaced by the immersion rises up the side = displacement. Now the stick is deeper in.

“Deeper-in” is the same as saying immersion. But immersion generates displacement. So displacement generates, by definition, more immersion. Does that lead to further displacement?

So is the stick ever deeper-in? This is the conundrum. Mathematically, it is. It does not matter how deep the bucket is.

But, one rightly asks, where would all the rest of the water come from? And how would it stay up above the bucket?

The source of this additional water is rather annoying, a problem which does not of course apply to the vast sea.

Let us therefore take the instance of a man standing ankle-deep at the edge of the sea, at ebb tide, with a six-foot pole in his hand, which he points into the sea.

He remains steadfast and unmoved, and soon he must be drowned and the whole globe also, according to what climate scientists in the climate change debate are trying to convince us of every day in the media.

They seem unable to see the mathematical paradox.

In case you didn't get it first time around, let us state the problem again. A stick placed in a pond will displace a volume of water.

The act of displacement raises the water level. The action of water-level-rise results, by definition, in the stick being immersed, which must (by definition) displace water, which in logical sequence should continue to raise the water level and immerse the stick and this must keep going indefinitely.

Despite the obvious fact that this would not happen, there is no mathematical flaw.

But bearing in mind that computers do not know the Law of Actual Reality, we are stuck with today’s screaming hysteria of runaway and unstoppable global warming.

It is a catastrophe of commonsense, not climate, and it is unlikely we will all perish due to a paradox.

There is no mention of where the vast quantities of water for any catastrophic sea-level rise will come from, or the endless supplies of CO2, as CO2 only ever constitutes 350 parts per million of the whole atmosphere at any one time, and has been over the past 30 years.

So far not one computer model of future global catastrophe has been validated. Not one model has demonstrated quite exactly how very tiny emissions of lukewarm CO2 extended briefly into the air are going to be able to supply sufficient heat to the frozen upper part of the atmosphere which is around -57C, then descend back down to engulf the whole planet with dangerously more warmth.

There is the real world that we live in, and there is the fantasy mathematical/computer-model dream world of Alice in Wonderland that climate scientists appear to inhabit.

The day the globe warms uncontrollably will be the same day that you discover that dipping the end of a long stick in shallow water makes the sea uncontrollably rise and rise and rise, to engulf the whole world.

For more predictions from Ken ring, visit www.predictweather.com .