Melbourne today recorded its coldest April morning for 60 years.

In Coldstream, in Melbourne’s outer east, the mercury dropped to -2.7C, while Mt Hotham had the morning’s lowest temperature of 4.4C – a day after the mountain recorded the lowest ever April minimum temperature of -8.2C.  Melbourne set another record yesterday when it recorded four days in a row below 15C for the first time since 1949.

Meanwhile, some Australian ski fields will open on the first weekend in May, for the first time ever.

Of course, a couple of cold Winters, or a couple of warm Summers, don’t make a long term change in global climate.

But even for the most determined warming alarmist, it is getting harder not to notice that despite the computer games, sorry, climate models, the world is not actually getting any warmer.

The media will lose interest in global warming over the coming year. No one is scared by global warming any more, so it won’t sell papers, and won’t increase advertising revenues.

When the media loses interest, the politicians will lose interest. They have short little attention spans anyway. When the politicians lose interest, the scientists will lose interest, because there won’t be bucket loads of grant money any more.

Fortunately for the media, another scary potential disaster is looming on the horizon. Swine Flu. Or some other Nasty Scary Disease that is probably just around the corner.

To keep advertising revenues up, the sky must always be falling. The reason may change, but the sky must always be falling.

So we (well, not you, intelligent reader, obviously) are led around by the nose, hypnotised by the latest scare. When the public gets scared, the politicians have to look as if they are doing something. So vast piles of money are wasted on each new potential disaster.

Real, present disasters, large numbers of people dying now, take a back seat to something scary that might happen soon, maybe.

To give just one example, the new strain of Swine Flu was identified on April 17th – about two weeks ago. The first cases may have been as early as a month ago. During this time Swine Flu has killed maybe ten people – not 150 – according to the World Health Organisation.

So it might be worrying if you are in poor health already and have been in contact with someone who is already infected.

By contrast, over the same 30 day period, some 180, 000 people, about one every 20 seconds, have died from Malaria, most of them children.