AS if on cue, with Britain still up to its knees in floods, Lancashire County Council announces a seminar on the likely effects of global warming as part of its plans to manage them.

Pardon me if the image of King Canute ranting helplessly at the ocean waves comes to mind as our County Hall politicians embark on a strategy to govern the weather.

But isn't this green guesswork.

It is blindly accepted by many in government, that the so-called greenhouse effect causing the climate to change is down to us chucking huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere?

You can bet already that the fervent LCC anti-car zealots' strategy will determine that what needs to be done is for us all to be turfed out of our cosy cars, which we have worked hard to buy and are taxed like hell to run.

Instead we will be shoved on to 'quality' buses after waiting and shivering in the rain at a stop 20 yards away from where the buses pull up, as folk have to do in Oswaldtwistle.

But even supposing the link with assumed climate change and the use of fossil fuels is valid, just what impact does Lancashire County Council imagine it might have on a global phenomenon?

We are told the record levels of rainfall responsible for the floods were the worst in two centuries, but can they explain how the even worse rain of the period before can be accounted for - when there were no cars or factories pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere?

But does this matter, when the need is not so much for a scientific answer, but for our elected representatives, piously and politically, to be seen to be seriously aware of the assumed mega-problem of moment?

Which, if you ask me, is not climate change, but anextraordinarily wet autumn. After all, it's only a few years ago, when the panic was over it not raining and the reservoirs running dry.