New collective noun

Philip Chaston has a wonderful new (or at least new to me) collective noun: "A certainty of alarmists". Perfect.

Take a pinch of salt, stir in speculation, and pluck figures from thin air. Simmer with press releases escaping. Voila! alarmism, without a shred of evidence, just setting out how the future will shape itself:

Climate change could cause global conflicts as large as the two world wars but lasting for centuries unless the problem is controlled, a leading defence think tank has warned.

The Royal United Services Institute said a tenfold increase in energy research spending to around £10 billion a year would be needed if the world were to avoid the worst effects of changing temperatures.

However the group said that the response to threats posed by climate change, such as rising sea levels and migration, had so far been "slow and inadequate," because nations had failed to prepare for the worst-case scenario.

The source of the report is Nick Mabey, a former senior member of the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit, and has an unsurprising background in environmental charities, non-governmental organisations, and think-tanks. He has contributed to the economic study of global warming and its transmutation into the agitprop term, 'climate change'.