What do Mary Robinson (Ex president of Ireland who slapped the Irish people in the face by resigning before the end of her first term in office to take up a better job at the UN), Nostradamus (medieval charlatan soothsayer) and Thomas Malthus (18th Century Philosopher and mathematician) have in common – they have all pretended at some time or other, that they could see into the future?

To this list you might also add the likes of Al Gore (the US President that never was). In 2006 Gore predicted that within 10 years we will hit a Climate tipping point. With two years to go we wait with bated breath. Ex Irish President Mary Robinson leaped into the fray (again) last month with the dire prediction that global leaders had “at most two decades to save the world” – ‘Quick Virgil prepare Thunderbird One – anything can happen in the next half hour’. Pause for hysterical laughter. Al and Mary would not have looked out of place among the pages of the late Sir Patrick Moore’s book ‘Countdown!… or how nigh is the end?‘ a chronicle of all the wacky doomsday predictions that have been made over the years.

Politicians such as Gore and Robinson cannot resist this ‘pretence of knowledge’. They claim with such certainty to know the future when in reality they are some of the most ill-informed and biased purveyors of misinformation on the planet.