When I was young, I worked on the gold mines. On many occasions, I worked in a chamber underground on 18 Level – which is 1 800 m below ground.

Underground it was hot and humid. Very hot. The temperature increases by about 25 °C for every kilometre underground, which means it can be as high as 45 °C underground. The workers are kept cool(ish) by ventilation fans but still it’s hot. Why it should be so is not quite clear. There is plenty of evidence that the centre of the Earth is hot (some reports indicate it is as hot as the sun) and that heat flows towards the surface. If you look it up, you find that, according to Scientific American, “There are three main sources of heat in the deep Earth: heat from when the planet formed and accreted, which has not yet been lost; frictional heating, caused by denser core material sinking to the centre of the planet; and heat from the decay of radioactive elements.” (Yes, that word: ‘accreted’. Me neither).

Candidly, I find two of these explanations pretty poor. The planet has been around for a very long time. Surely, the heat would be in balance right now? With regard to the heat from the decay of radioactive elements, we would expect that the heating may be caused by the decay of uranium into radon gas. The half-life of this process is 1 600 years. The half-life of radioactive radon decaying into more stable radon is about three days, but it gives off very little energy in the decay. So, why is it hot in deep Earth? And (more importantly) when you go to a health spa, are you getting cooked by radiation?

But let’s look at something else. In Norway, there is a melting ice patch. I quote: “Broken sleds, tools and other traces of daily life going back nearly 2 000 years lay strewn across the surface of the Lendbreen ice patch, which was melting rapidly due to global warming.” There is one unfortunate problem with blaming this melting on global warming. When a young Norwegian lost the sleds and tools (and arrows) there couldn’t have been any ice. It’s an ice patch, not a glacier. Would be melted. An archaeologist refutes this: “We get angry reactions to our finds from climate science deniers all the time,” lead archaeologist on the Secret of the Ice project Lars Pilø told Artnet News. “The whole idea that one can disprove the climate science behind global warming with archaeological finds shows a stunning level of ignorance.”

Well. Let’s face it – if you disprove climate change, there’s going to be trouble. Right now, there are ten climate change conferences planned in the next year, all of them affording interested parties the chance of a government-sponsored holiday to a desirable destination with great accommodation. No climate change, no fun. And then the massive money that can be made by unqualified self-appointed experts who get paid to do impact assessments, write articles, among others, will dry up.

So, I am giving them all a real alternative. Forget global climate change and enter Earth heating. We can blame all the atmospheric changes entirely on the premise that the Earth is getting hotter, causing the oceans to cook up, expand and rise, ice to melt, warm current to circulate, causing tsunamis, fish to die off, coral reefs to fossilise, snow to fall in Kimberly and Something Good Roadhouse in Port Elizabeth to flood. The benefits of believing in Earth warming are manifold: there can still be the same number of conferences, government-sponsored holidays, written articles, prophets of doom and the problem can never be fixed. The gravy train never stops. Greta Thunberg can grow old and win the Nobel Prize. Cheap package flights on aircraft flying to conferences and giving off carbon dioxide can resume; power stations can run on coal and wind turbines dismantled. What’s there not to like? Earth warming!