There is little doubt that climate change is affecting the seasons. This year, thanks to an unseasonably cool summer, the Silly Season has arrived somewhat late.

The absence of absurd narratives under the leaden skies of July and August has given way to a cascade of comical copy as ‘the summer that never was’ drips away.

Kevin Keegan and Newcastle United alone produced a torrent of tabloid titters. Excitable Junior Minister, Ivan Lewis proved that making a fool of yourself is easy by text message. And then there’s Chancellor Darling, who in a disarming outbreak of frankness described the economic situation as, “arguably the worst for 60 years”. As inflation has made words more expensive, “arguably” was conveniently dropped by some media. Even so, why 60 years? 1948 was austere I know, but wasn’t the country recovering from events more cataclysmic than the credit crunch?

No silly season would be complete without some clown predicting the world is about to end. If you are reading this column it didn’t.

This is despite yesterday’s switch on of the Large Hadron Collider at Europe’s nuclear research organisation (CERN) near Geneva. This fancy experiment attempts to reveal the secrets of the formation of the universe by replicating conditions in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang. A few fear that the conditions within this mother of all chemistry sets could create micro black holes setting off a chain reaction of world ending potential.

I wonder what Mario off Big Brother would have had to say about that? As for the Planning Committee that gave permission to build CERN’s 17-mile tunnel of doom, all I can say is it must have been a long meeting.

Of course nobody really knows what will come out of an experiment – otherwise they wouldn’t need to do the experiment in the first place. But, even without being an expert in particle physics, I can see some real benefits flowing from this one.

Perhaps it will prove possible to replace beams of protons with members of Mr Brown’s Cabinet. Were Ed Balls and David Miliband to collide at near light speed the conditions of harmony immediately following the 1997 General Election could be reproduced, giving Labour a massive lead in the polls if only for a trillionth of a second.

If the atoms of Conservative Councillor Cumpsty were fused with those of David Cameron it could actually produce a policy.

Were super accelerated neutrons to be bombarded against the Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, would people still say, “Who?”

Maybe by accelerating John Madejski’s few remaining coppers to unimaginable speeds Steve Coppell will find a player he actually wants?

OK, so the last one is far fetched, I’ll admit, but science produces unexpected benefits. Were it not for the work of Tim Berners-Lee in a previous experiment at CERN there would be no World Wide Web and we couldn’t shop for shoes at 3am!

As for eschatology, the Jehovah’s Witnesses (who now strangely claim they were misreported) have worked out that putting a date to Armageddon can damage your credibility somewhat, though others persist.

Not that it bothers John McCain and the Republicans, whose need for the votes of Christian fundamentalists demands a running mate who allegedly believes in the end of days, favours teaching creationism and, despite all the scientific evidence, believes climate change is not man made because Big Oil said so.

Given Senator McCain’s age, Scary Sarah could well acquire the means to bring about her belief in the apocalypse.

Is that wise? Don’t lose too much sleep. She’ll claim she was misreported.