Ellwood: "It all comes down to the hole in the Ozone layer which is allowing the planet to heat up."
I once had a dog called Ellwood. He'd been horribly abused. He was a lot smarter than Tobias.
Conservative Member of Parliament for Bournemouth East and Chair of the House of Commons Select Defence Committee, Tobias Ellwood, was invited onto the James Whale Show on Talk Radio to talk about the threat of climate change. Here he is from 11' 40" onwards. You have to watch it to believe it.
Here are a few juicy quotes taken from that erudite explanation by Ellwood of what climate change is and why we need to be concerned about it:
"So when we come to saying how can we change this, it all comes down to this hole in the ozone layer which is allowing the planet to heat up and we can actually close back this ozone layer if we're a little bit more careful about CO2 emissions."
Eh? Hole in the ozone layer? CO2 emissions? What's that all about then? Well, according to science genius Ellwood:
"A lot of the stuff that we are burning today has been accumulated over millions of years, and coal and so forth and that is causing such a jump in CO2 emissions, it's causing to burn a hole in the ozone layer."
Ah, right, so CO2 from fossil fuels has 'burnt' a hole in the ozone layer and this is causing the planet to heat up. If you compare the Ellwood explanation of man-made climate change with Johnson's explanation, this actually makes Johnson, who likens CO2 to a "great tea cosy in the sky", seem like a Cambridge physics don.
Presenter: "It's not burning holes in the ozone layer though is it, that was CFC's, this is about greenhouse gases."
Ellwood: "It's the same thing, it's the same thing, it's causing our planet to heat up because the sun is able to have too much of an impact."
Yep, Ellwoodian Fizzics basically states that if you burn a hole in the ozone layer with fossil fuel carbon dioxide, then the Sun is able to sneak through that hole and heat up the planet even more, so you've got to close the hole up in order to stop deserts growing, ice caps melting, crops failing and sea levels rising. Simples.
This is the man who is presumably highly influential in the UK's defence policy folks. Sleep well. We've got a safe pair of hands there - minus the brain, of course.