Oh no, not again.  When I was young the buzz was about the coming Ice Age - and it was common sense.  Since 90,000 out of every 100,000 years of human history have been Ice Ages and it's been 12,000 years since the last one, logically we have been overdue.

But simple physics says that when you add more people and more pollution to a finite space things will get warmer so warming is a lot more likely than cooling.

Not so, says a writer in the Daily Telegraph, who instead sides with meteorologist Piers Corbyn because Corbyn said it would not be a mild winter, contrary to the Met Office, which this decade began fashionably billing itself as Met Office: Weather and climate change.

It's certainly not a mild winter in London so far, though you'd think after a few millenia Brits would learn how to deal with snow.   Corbyn is an astrophysicist by education, like James Hansen in the US, and claims to be accurate in his predictions 85% of the time.   Farmers, obviously, take accuracy over academics any day of the week so they are willing to suspend disbelief over effects in the future if it can save crops this year.

How does he beat the Met Office?   Using the Sun, he says.    He sees what the Sun is doing now and then the last time it did something similar and makes a forecast.   Does it work?  In a limited sense, sure, I buy the Farmer's Almanac every year out of nostalgia and it is fairly accurate - as long as climate effects stay linear, it will continue to be.

Oppressed Underdogs will also get popularity in the media, that is how newspapers get sold, but whether or not Corbyn is simply lucky is harder to determine than whether or not we will have an early spring.