The snow-less delusions of Dale Vince

Just before Christmas, Dale Vince, prominent Labour Party donor and renewable-energy tycoon, warned that ‘Snow is fast becoming a thing of the past in the UK’. ‘It’ll be harder and harder to ignore the fact that we don’t get snow anymore, and the reason why – climate change. Obvs.’

Are you sure about that, Dale? The start of 2026 has been excruciatingly cold in the UK. London has been plunged into sub-freezing temperatures, and thick snow has blanketed the north of England and Scotland since the weekend. As a result, schools have shut, airports have closed and trains have been cancelled.

Yet again, it seems the weather is stubbornly refusing to conform to the dire predictions of climate catastrophists.

Vince is far from alone in his alarmist prophecies. In 2023, UN chief António Guterres declared that: ‘The era of global warming has ended, the era of global boiling has arrived.’ In 2020, the BBC warned that snow would soon ‘become a thing of the past’ in the UK. Memorably, Dr David Viner, senior climate scientist at the University of East Anglia, said in 2000 that snow would become a ‘rare and exciting event’ in Britain. ‘Children just aren’t going to know what snow is’, he told the Independent.

Well, children in Cumbria certainly know what snow is now, if they were ever in any doubt. It reached a Siberian minus 11 degrees Celsius in the northern English county on Sunday night. So do the poor wee bairns in the Scottish Highlands, where 40cm of snow was dumped over the weekend.

Indeed, so cold has it been that much of Scotland and the north of England have been immobilised by snow and ice. Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport closed on Monday, as did several Scottish airports. Scotland’s regional airline, Loganair, has cancelled flights from Aberdeen and Inverness. LNER has abandoned train services north of Edinburgh. In Northern Ireland, 170 schools are closed. A reporter for BBC Scotland says the weather there ‘feels like the worst it’s been in the past 15 years’.

None of this is likely to make a dent in the ossified delusions of people like Vince. In six months’ time, when the UK experiences its first moderately sunny day of the year, we can all expect to be bombarded with lamentations about the horrors of global boiling.

Until then, the rest of us will simply have to wrap up warm.

Hugo Timms is a staff writer at spiked.