LONDON

A NEW STUDY carried out by a left-wing think tank in London has suggested that modern global warming could have its origins in the enormous amounts of documents burned by failing empires and defeated regimes during the first seventy five years of the Twentieth Century.

“The sheer volume of paper destroyed by burning, particularly between the fall of the Chinese imperial regime in 1911 and the fall of Saigon in 1975, has a curious parallel in the rise of global temperatures when you look at them side by side,” says Dr Reg Washer-Ringnut, a leading fellow in post-colonial research at the Arthur Scargill Institute in Hackney. “Indeed, each time a major power fell, there was a spike in temperatures that can only be explained by reference to the furious attempts by colonial regimes to cover their track as their imperial possessions fell like dominoes. Mountains of paperwork were destroyed by fire and those fires sent all their carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Forget industry, the working man has nothing on the guilty imperialist. Three major humps appear in our figures, the Fall of France in 1940; the disintegration of the British Empire after World War Two; and the American defeat in Vietnam. The last of these is probably responsible for much of the global warming we are measuring today.”

The study adds that the current flat-lining in planetary warming has as much to do with the decrease in official document destruction as it does with people behaving well. Dr Washer-Ringnut explained: “The empires are all gone. And then there’s computers. You just wipe it clean now, no need to burn paper. Good for the defeated, great for the Earth.”