Bookmakers banned him because whenever he bet on the weather he would clean up.

Shropshire-bred weather expert Piers Corbyn isn’t lucky – when it comes to predicting what’s going to fall out of the sky and how many layers of waterproof clothing to wear, he’s just more right than most other people.

“I went to William Hill for 12 years and bet £600 a month on the weather,” he says, “and I was winning back 30 to 40 per cent, which was about £20,000 or something.

“Then they stopped it – they refused to do it any more.”

The weather is a British obsession and with the term “global warming” used to explain every freak climate change from the hottest April on record to the wettest June ever and the disastrous July floods, everyone is suddenly an expert.

However, Piers, a former student of Adams Grammar School in Newport and now a long-range weather forecaster for Weather Action in London, remains at odds with the views of international scientists and is sceptical about carbon dioxide as a key driver of climate change.

He wants nothing to do with what he describes as “the promotion of hysteria” and says changes in world climate have nothing to do with man, the emissions pumped from the exhaust pipe of his BMW, or the size of his so-called carbon footprint.

He recently argued his corner on the topic for Channel 4′s explosive documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle.

Speaking from his London office, he says: “In terms of global warming, the world is cooling down not heating up and has been since the peak of 1998. It’s a nonsense.

“There has been warming from 1910 to 2000, now that has stopped. It’s a nonsense that it is caused by man – it’s a natural process.”

It means that in terms of man-made global warming Piers cares not a jot for his carbon footprint or campaigns to reduce the size of it.

“I take absolutely no precautions myself – I think everyone should have a carbon footprint as big as Al Gore’s,” he says with a note of sarcasm in reference to the eco principles of the eco-principled American politician who made Oscar-winning climate change movie An Inconvenient Truth.

“It’s having no effect – it’s a movement to make people feel guilty about living.”

He is, however, concerned with squandering precious world energy sources but describes such forms of generating energy from things like wind power as “stupid”.

Born on the day of the big thaw of March, 1947, following the extreme winter that year, ten years later he moved from Wiltshire to Newport where he grew up at Yew Tree Manor on Pave Lane.

It was here, while studying at the grammar school, that he became fascinated with the weather and built a giant barometer, the first of many homemade contraptions.

“I did a lot of thinking at that house and I built the barometer up the side of the house, 30ft high – there are still the marks on the wall where it was,” he says.

“I remember recording that astoundingly cold winter of 1963 where the temperature went down to minus 17 degrees.

“I also built an anemometer to measure the wind speed, and I’ve still got it.”

Here was a boy doing what boys interested in science did – experimenting to his heart’s content and building an array of homemade meteorological inventions which also included a soil moisture measuring device made out of an old oil drum.

There was also a contraption made from a bucket with a glass top which was fitted with a thermometer and some soot and measured the radiation temperature of the cooling night sky. Brilliant.

Driven by weather and its effects, he won a Royal Scholarship to study physics at Imperial College, London, was top of the class and emerged clutching a first class honours degree.

Later he began researching a new method of predicting the weather for up to 12 month in advance. The technique involved studying the activity of the sun and matching various force factors, winds and the state of the moon, then overlaying the results with similar weather patterns from previous years.

His methods were simple, as simple goes. And largely correct.

So convinced was he about the success of his predictions that as another experiment he tested them down at the local bookies and created a silver lining from every cloud in the sky.

Today Piers is a respected astrophysicist and through his company Weather Action is in demand for his predictions.

This summer was supposed to be the warmest on record, according to some experts. Piers, however, had other ideas and in January was back to his betting ways, raising the stakes and inviting bets from anyone who would put their money where there mouth was.

“Nobody came forward to place a bet,” he says.

Piers has again been proved largely correct with his weather predictions. He warned about the large scale flooding of June six months ago.

And as far as the rest of the summer – what summer?

“Just don’t throw away those wellies and woollies,” he says.

By Ben Bentley