Ed Miliband, Energy and Climate Change Secretary, has his work cut out - Telegraph

Whether you are a climate-change denier, a sceptic or a believer in the scientific consensus on global warming, you have to admit that there is something preposterous about making someone Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change.

It's a bit like giving King Canute added responsibility for sea level rise: it implies that he can do something about it.

University of Western Ontario physics professor Wayne Hocking - Global warming change part of bigger picture

But with all of the data he has collected on atmospheric changes over the last 15 years, Hocking is hesitant to claim he can make any predictions about global warming.

“For this to be effective, we need to be there for 20, 30, 40 years, have a long-term data set and then we can start to make useful predictions,” he says.

He says researchers do not know enough about the atmospheric changes and how they influence each other to draw any conclusions about global warming.

“We know there is so much complexity involved, we want to tread more cautiously,” he says. “Maybe in 10 years time, it’ll all start to freeze over, we just don’t know.”