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Post by mrsonde on Oct 4, 2017 6:54:31 GMT 1
Which reminds me - a brilliant essay by Clive James in the must-read "Climate Change - The Facts 2017." Hopefully not his final swan song.
Mass Death Dies Hard
Clive James
When you tell people once too often that the missing extra heat is hiding in the ocean,
they will switch over to watch Game of Thrones, where the dialogue is less ridiculous
and all the threats come true. The proponents of man-made climate catastrophe
asked us for so many leaps of faith that they were bound to run out of credibility in
the end. Now that they finally seem to be doing so, it could be a good time for those
of us who have never been convinced by all those urgent warnings to start warning
each other that we might be making a comparably senseless tactical error if we expect
the elastic cause of the catastrophists, and all of its exponents, to go away in a
hurry.
I speak as one who knows nothing about the mathematics involved in modelling
non-linear systems. But I do know quite a lot about the mass media, and far too much
about the abuse of language. So I feel qualified to advise against any triumphalist
urge to compare the apparently imminent disintegration of the alarmist cause to the
collapse of a house of cards. Devotees of that fond idea haven’t thought hard enough
about their metaphor. A house of cards collapses only with a sigh, and when it has
finished collapsing all the cards are still there.
Although the alarmists might finally have to face that they will not get much more
of what they want on a policy level, they will surely, on the level of their own employment,
go on wanting their salaries and prestige. To take a conspicuous if ludicrous
case, the Australian climate star Tim Flannery will probably not, of his own free will,
shrink back to the position conferred by his original metier, as an expert on the extinction
of the giant wombat. He is far more likely to go on being, and wishing to be,
one of the mass media’s mobile oracles about climate. While that possibility continues,
it will go on being dangerous to stand between him and a TV camera. If the giant
wombat could have moved at that speed, it would still be with us.
The mere fact that few of Flannery’s predictions have ever come even remotely
true need not be enough to discredit him. The same fact, in the case of America’s Professor
Ehrlich, has left him untouched ever since he predicted that the world would
soon run out of copper. In those days, when our current phase of the long discussion
about man’s attack on nature was just beginning, he predicted mass death by
extreme cold. Lately he predicts mass death by extreme heat. But he has always predicted
mass death by extreme something, and he is always Professor Ehrlich.
Actually, a more illustrative starting point for the theme of the permanently imminent
climatic apocalypse might be taken as 3 August 1971, when the Sydney Morning
Herald announced that the Great Barrier Reef would be dead in six months. After six
months the reef had not died, but it has been going to die almost as soon as that ever
since; making it a strangely durable emblem for all those who have wedded themselves
to the notion of climate catastrophe.
The most exalted of all the world’s predictors of reef death, President Obama, has
still not seen the reef even now but he promises to go there one day when it is well
again. Assurances that it has never really been sick won’t be coming from his senior
science adviser John Holdren. In the middle of 2016 some of the long-term experts
on reef death began admitting that they had all been overdoing the propaganda.
After almost half a century of reef death prediction, this was the first instance of
one group of reef death predictors telling another group to dial down the alarmism,
or they would queer the pitch for everybody. But an old hand like Holdren knows better
than to listen to sudden outbursts of moderation. Back in the day, when extreme
cooling was the fashion, he was an extreme coolist. Lately he is an extreme warmist.
He will surely continue to be an extremist of some kind, even if he has to be an extreme
moderate. And after all, his boss was right about the ocean. In his acceptance
speech at the 2008 Democratic convention, Obama said – and I truly wish that this
were an inaccurate paraphrase – that people should vote for him if they wanted to
stop the ocean rising. He got elected, and it didn’t rise.
The notion of a count-down or a tipping point is very dear to both wings of this
deaf shouting match, and really is of small use to either. On the catastrophist wing,
whose ‘narrative’, as they might put it, would so often seem to be a synthesised film
script left overfrom the era of surround-sound disaster movies, there is always a countdown
to the tipping point. When the scientists are the main contributors to the script,
the tipping point will be something like the forever forthcoming moment when the
Gulf Stream turns upside down or the Antarctic ice sheet comes off its hinges, or
any other extreme event which, although it persists in not happening, could happen
sooner than we think (science correspondents who can write a phrase like ‘sooner
than we think’ seldom realise that they might have already lost you with the word
‘could’).
When the politicians join in the writing, the dramatic language declines to the
infantile. There are only 50 days (Gordon Brown) or 100 months (Prince Charles wearing
his political hat) left for mankind to ‘do something’ about ‘the greatest moral challenge
. . . of our generation’. (Kevin Rudd, before he arrived at the Copenhagen climate
shindig in 2009.)
When he left Copenhagen, Rudd scarcely mentioned the greatest moral challenge
again. Perhaps he had deduced, from the confusion prevailing throughout the conference,
that the chances of the world ever uniting its efforts to ‘do something’ were
very small. Whatever his motives for backing out of the climate chorus, his subsequent
career was an early demonstration that to cease being a chorister would be no
easy retreat, because it would be a clear indication that everything you had said on
the subject up to then had been said in either bad faith or ignorance. It would not be
enough merely to fall silent. You would have to travel back in time, run for office in
the Czech Republic instead of Australia, and call yourself Vaclav Klaus.
Australia, unlike Kevin Rudd, has a globally popular role in the climate movie because
it looks the part. Common reason might tell you that a country whose contribution
to the world’s emissions is only 1.4% can do very little about the biggest moral
challenge even if it manages to reduce that contribution to zero; but your eyes tell you
that Australia is burning up. On the classic alarmist principle of ‘just stick your head
out of the window and look around you’, Australia always looks like Overwhelming Evidence
that the alarmists must be right. Even now that the global warming scare has
completed its transformation into the climate change scare so that any kind of event
at either end of the scale of temperature can qualify as a crisis, Australia remains the
top area of interest, still up there ahead of even the melting North Pole, despite the
Arctic’s miraculous capacity to go on producing ice in defiance of all instructions from
Al Gore. A ‘C’-student to his marrow, and thus never quick to pick up any reading matter
at all, Gore has evidently never seen the Life magazine photographs of America’s
nuclear submarine Skate surfacing through the North Pole in 1959. The ice up there
is often thin, and sometimes vanishes. But it comes back, especially when someone
sufficiently illustrious confidently predicts that it will go away for good.
After 4.5 billion years of changing, the climate that made outback Australia ready
for Baz Luhrmann’s view-finder looked all set to end the world tomorrow. History
has already forgotten that the schedule for one of the big drought sequences in his
movie Australia was wrecked by rain, and certainly history will never be reminded
by the mass media, which loves a picture that fits the story. In this way, the polar
bear balancing on the photo-shopped shrinking ice-floe will always have a future in
show business, and the cooling towers spilling steam will always be up there in the
background of the TV picture while the panel of experts discuss what Julia Gillard
still calls ‘carbon’, her word for carbon dioxide. Pictures of her house near the beach in
Adelaide, on the other hand, will never be used to illustrate satirical articles about a
retired prophet of the rising ocean who buys a house near the beach, because there
won’t be any such articles. The full 97% of all satirists who dealt themselves out of the
climate subject back at the start look like staying out of it until the end, even if they
get satirised in their turn. One could blame them for their pusillanimity, but it would
be useless, and perhaps unfair. Nobody will be able plausibly to call Emma Thompson
dumb for spreading gloom and doom about the climate: she’s too clever and too
creative. And anyway, she might be right. Cases like Leonardo di Caprio and Cate
Blanchett are rare enough to be called brave. Otherwise, the consensus of silence
from the wits and thespians continues to be impressive. If they did wish to speak up
for scepticism, however, they wouldn’t find it easy when the people who run the big
TV outlets forbid the wrong kind of humour. On Saturday Night Live back there in
2007, Will Ferrell, brilliantly pretending to be George W. Bush, was allowed to get ev-
ery word of the global warming message wrong, but he wasn’t allowed to disbelieve
it.
Just as all branches of the modern media love a picture of something that might
be part of the Overwhelming Evidence for climate change even if it is really a picture
of something else, they all love a clock ticking down to zero, and if the clock never
quite gets there then the motif can be exploited forever. But the editors and producers
must face the drawback of such perpetual excitement: it gets perpetually less
exciting. Numbness sets in, and there is time to think after all. Some of the customers
might even start asking where this language of rubber numbers has been heard before.
It was heard from Swift. In Gulliver’s Travels he populated his flying island of Laputa
with scientists busily using rubber numbers to predict dire events. He called these
scientists ‘projectors’. At the basis of all the predictions of the projectors was the prediction
that the Earth was in danger from a Great Comet whose tail was ‘ten hundred
thousand and fourteen’ miles long. I should concede at this point that a sardonic parody
is not necessarily pertinent just because it is funny; and that although it might
be unlikely that the Earth will soon be threatened by man-made climate change, it
might be less unlikely that the Earth will be threatened eventually by an asteroid, or
let it be a Great Comet; after all, the Earth has been hit before.
That being said, however, we can note that Swift has got the language of artificial
crisis exactly right, to the point that we might have trouble deciding whether he invented
it, or merely copied it from scientific voices surrounding him in his day. James
Hansen is a Swiftian figure. Blithely equating trains full of coal to trains full of people
on their way to Auschwitz, Hansen is utterly unaware that he has not only turned the
stomachs of the informed audience he was out to impress, he has lost their attention.
Professor of Earth Sciences Chris Turney, who led a ship full of climate change
enthusiasts into the Antarctic ice to see how the ice was doing under the influence
of climate change and found it was doing well enough to trap the ship, could have
been invented by Swift. (Turney’s subsequent Guardian article, in which he explained
how this embarrassment was due only to a quirk of the weather, and had nothing to
do with a possible mistake about the climate, was a Swiftian lampoon in all respects.)
Compulsorily retired now from the climate scene, Dr Rajendra Pachauri was a zany
straight from Swift, by way of a Bollywood remake of The Party starring the local imitator
of Peter Sellers; if Dr Johnson could have thought of Pachauri, Rasselas would
be much more entertaining than it is. Finally, and supremely, Tim Flannery could have
been invented by Swift after ten cups of coffee too many with Stella. He wanted to
keep her laughing. Swift projected the projectors who now surround us.
They came out of the grant-hungry fringe of semi-science to infect the heart of the
mass media, where a whole generation of commentators taught each other to speak
and write a hyperbolic doom language(‘unprecedented’, ‘irreversible’, etcetera), which
you might have thought was sure to doom them in their turn. After all, nobody with
an intact pair of ears really listens for long to anyone who talks about ‘the planet’ or
‘carbon’ or ‘climate denial’ or ‘the science’. But for now – and it could be a long now
– the advocates of drastic action are still armed with a theory that no fact doesn’t fit.
The theory has always been manifestly unfalsifiable, but there are few science pundits
in the mass media who could tell Karl Popper from Mary Poppins. More startling
than their ignorance, however, is their defiance of logic. You can just about see how
a bunch of grant-dependent climate scientists might go on saying that there was
never a Medieval Warm Period even after it has been pointed out to them that any
old corpse dug up from the permafrost could never have been buried in it. But how
can a bunch of supposedly enlightened writers go on saying that? Their answer, if
pressed, is usually to say that the question is too elementary to be considered.
Alarmists have always profited from their insistence that climate change is such
a complex issue that no ‘science denier’ can have an opinion about it worth hearing.
For most areas of science such an insistence would be true. But this particular
area has a knack of raising questions that get more and more complicated in the absence
of an answer to the elementary ones. One of those elementary questions is
about how man-made carbon dioxide can be a driver of climate change if the global
temperature has not gone up by much over the last twenty years but the amount
of man-made carbon dioxide has. If we go on to ask a supplementary question –
say, how could carbon dioxide raise temperature when the evidence of the ice cores
indicates that temperature has always raised carbon dioxide – we will be given complicated
answers, but we still haven’t had an answer to the first question, except for
the suggestion that the temperature, despite the observations, really has gone up,
but that the extra heat is hiding in the ocean. It is not necessarily science denial to
propose that this long professional habit of postponing an answer to the first and
most elementary question is bizarre. Richard Feynman said that if a fact doesn’t fit
the theory, the theory has to go. Feynman was a scientist. Einstein realised that the
Michelson–Morley experiments hinted at a possible fact that might not fit Newton’s
theory of celestial mechanics. Einstein was a scientist too. Those of us who are not
scientists, but who are sceptical about the validity of this whole issue – who suspect
that the alleged problem might be less of a problem than is made out – have plenty
of great scientific names to point to for exemplars, and it could even be said that we
could point to the whole of science itself. Being resistant to the force of its own inertia
is one of the things that science does.
When the climatologists upgraded their frame of certainty from global warming
to climate change, the bet-hedging manoeuvre was so blatant that some of the sceptics
started predicting in their turn; the alarmist cause must surely now collapse, like
a house of cards. A tipping point had been reached. Unfortunately for the cause of
rational critical enquiry, the campaign for immediate action against climate doom
reaches a tipping point every few minutes, because the observations, if not the calculations,
never cease exposing it as a fantasy. I myself, after I observed Andrew Neil
on BBC TV wiping the floor with the then Secretary for Energy and Climate Change
Ed Davey, thought that the British government’s energy policy could not survive, and
that the mad work which had begun with Ed Miliband’s Climate Act of 2008 must now
surely begin to come undone. Neil’s well-informed list of questions had been a tipping
point. But it changed nothing in the short term. It didn’t even change the BBC,
which continued uninterrupted with its determination that the alarmist view should
not be questioned.
How did the upmarket mass media get themselves into such a condition of servility?
One is reminded of that fine old historian George Grote, when he said that he
had taken his A History of Greece only to the point where the Greeks themselves failed
to realise they were slaves. The BBC’s monotonous plugging of the climate theme
in its science documentaries is too obvious to need remarking, but it’s what the science
programmes never say that really does the damage. Even the news programmes
get ‘smoothed’ to ensure that nothing interferes with the constant business of protecting
the climate change theme’s dogmatic status. To take a simple but telling example:
when Sigmar Gabriel, Germany’s Vice Chancellor and man in charge of the
Energiewende, talked rings around Greenpeace hecklers with nothing on their minds
but renouncing coal, or told executives of the renewable energy companies that they
could no longer take unlimited subsidesfor granted, these instructive moments could
be seen on German television but were not excerpted and subtitled for British television
even briefly, despite Gabriel’s accomplishments as a natural TV star, and despite
the fact that he himself was no sceptic.
Wrong message: easier to leave him out. And if the climate scientist Judith Curry
appears before a US Senate committee and manages to defend her anti-alarmist position
against concentrated harassment from a senator whose only qualification for
the discussion is that he can impugn her integrity with a rhetorical contempt of which
she is too polite to be capable? Leave it to YouTube. In this way, the BBC has spent
ten years unplugged from a vital part of the global intellectual discussion, with an
increasing air of provincialism as the inevitable result. As the UK now begins the long
process of exiting the European Union, we can reflect that the departing nation’s most
important broadcasting institution has been behaving, for several years, as if its true
aim were to reproduce the thought control that prevailed in the Soviet Union.
As for the print media, it’s no mystery why the upmarket newspapers do an even
more thorough job than the downmarket newspapers of suppressing any dissenting
opinion on the climate. In Britain, the Telegraph sensibly gives a column to the diligently
sceptical Christopher Booker, and Matt Ridley has recently been able to get a
few rational articles into the Times, but a more usual arrangement is exemplified by
my own newspaper, the Guardian, which entrusts all aspects of the subject to George
Monbiot, who once informed his green readership that there was only one reason I
could presume to disagree with him, and them: I was an old man, soon to be dead,
and thus with no concern for the future of ‘the planet’. I would have damned his impertinence,
but it would have been like getting annoyed with a wheelbarrow full of
freshly cut grass.
These byline names are stars committed to their opinion, but what’s missing from
the posh press is the non-star name committed to the job of building a fact-file and
extracting a reasoned article from it. Further down the market, when the Daily Mail
put its no-frills news-hound David Rose on the case after Climategate, his admirable
competence immediately got him labelled as a ‘climate change denier’: one of the
first people to be awarded that badge of honour. The other tactic used to discredit
him was the standard one of calling his paper a disreputable publication. It might
be – having been a victim of its prurience myself, I have no inclination to revere it –
but it hasn’t forgotten what objective reporting is supposed to be. Most of the British
papers have, and the reason is no mystery.
They can’t afford to remember. The print media are on their way down the drain.
With almost no personnel left to do the writing, the urge at editorial level is to give
all the science stuff to one bloke. The print edition of The Independent bored its way
out of business when their resident climate nag was allowed to write half the paper.
In its last year, when the doomwatch journalists were threatened by the climate industry
with a newly revised consensus opinion that a mere two-degree increase in
world temperature might be not only acceptable but likely, the Independent’s chap
retaliated by writing stories about how the real likelihood was an increase of five degrees,
and in a kind of frenzied crescendo he wrote a whole front page saying that
the global temperature was ‘on track’ for an increase of six degrees. Not long after,
the Indy’s print edition closed down.
At the New York Times, Andrew Revkin, star colour-piece writer on the climate beat,
makes the whole subject no less predictable than his prose style: a cruel restriction.
In Australia, the Fairfax papers, which by now have almost as few writers as readers,
reprint Revkin’s summaries as if they were the voice of authority, and will probably go
on doing so until the waters close overhead. On the ABC, the house science pundit
Robyn Williams famously predicted that the rising of the waters ‘could’ amount to
100 metres in the next century. But not even he predicted that it could happen next
week. At the Sydney Morning Herald, it could happen next week. The only remaining
journalists could look out of the window, and see fish.
Bending their efforts to sensationalise the news on a scale previously unknown
even in their scrappy history, the mass media have helped to consolidate a pernicious
myth. But they could not have done this so thoroughly without the accident that they
are the main source of information and opinion for people in the academic world
and in the scientific institutions. Few of those people have been reading the sceptical
blogs: they have no time. If I myself had not been so ill during the relevant timespan,
I might not have been reading them either, and might have remained confined
within the misinformation system where any assertion of forthcoming disaster counts
as evidence. The effect of this mountainous accumulation of sanctified alarmism on
the academic world is another subject. Some of the universities deserve to be closed
down, but I expect they will muddle through, if only because the liberal spirit, when it
regains its strength, is likely to be less vengeful than the dogmatists were when they
ruled. Finding that the power of inertia blesses their security as once it blessed their
influence, the enthusiasts might have the sense to throttle back on their certitude,
huddle under the blanket cover provided by the concept of ‘post-normal science’, and
wait in comfort to be forgotten.
As for the learned societies and professional institutions, it was never a puzzle
that so many of them became instruments of obfuscation instead of enlightenment.
Totalitarianism takes over a state at the moment when the ruling party is taken over
by its secretariat; the tipping point is when Stalin, with his lists of names, offers to stay
late after the meeting and take care of business. The same vulnerability applies to any
learned institution. Rule by bureaucracy favours mediocrity, and in no time at all you
are in a world where Julia Slingo is a figure of authority, and Judith Curry is fighting
to breathe. Under Stalin, Trofim Lysenko became more indispensable the more he
reduced all the other biologists to the same condition as Soviet agriculture, and even
after Stalin was dead, it took Andrei Sakharov to persuade Khrushchev not to bring
Lysenko back to office. Khrushchev was well aware that Lysenko was a charlatan, but
he looked like an historic force; and who argues with one of those?
On a smaller scale of influential prestige, Lord Stern lends the Royal Society the
honour of his presence. For those of us who regard him as a vocalised stuffed shirt, it
is no use saying that his confident pronouncements about the future are only those
of an economist. Vaclav Klaus was only an economist when he tried to remind us that
Malthusian clairvoyance is invariably a harbinger of totalitarianism. But Klaus was a
true figure of authority. Alas, true figures of authority are in short supply, and tend
not to have much influence when they get to speak.
All too often, this is because they care more about science than about the media.
As recently as 2015, after a full ten years of nightly proof that this particular scientific
dispute was a media event before it was anything, Freeman Dyson was persuaded to
go on television. He was up there just long enough to say that the small proportion
of carbon dioxide that was man-made could only add to the world’s supply of plant
food. The world’s mass media outlets ignored the footage, mainly because they didn’t
know who he was. I might not have known either if I hadn’t spent, in these last few
years, enough time in hospitals to have it proved to me on a personal basis that real
science is as indispensable for modern medicine as cheap power. Among his many
achievements, to none of which he has ever cared about drawing attention, Dyson
designed the TRIGA reactor. The TRIGA ensures that the world’s hospitals get a reliable
supply of isotopes.
Dyson served science. Except for the few hold-outs who go on fighting to defend
the objective nature of truth, most of the climate scientists who get famous are
serving themselves. There was a time when the journalists could have pointed out
the difference, but now they have no idea. Instead, they are so celebrity-conscious
that they would supply Tim Flannery with a new clown-suit if he wore out the one
he is wearing now. In 2016, he dived on the Great Barrier Reef and reported himself
overwhelmed by the evidence that it was on the point of death, a symptomatology
which, he said, he had recently learned to recognise by watching his father die. Neither
he nor any of his admirers at the Sydney Morning Herald cared to note that it has
now been almost 50 years that the reef has been going to die soon. But the moment
never came, although it will probably go on being about to happen for the next 50
years as well. The reef death disaster is like those millions of climate change refugees
who were going to flood into the West by 2010. They never arrived. But when the
refugees from the war in Syria started to arrive, there was a ready-made media apparatus
waiting to declare that they were the missing climate change refugees really,
because what else had caused the war but climate change? They were the missing
heat that had been hiding in the ocean.
A bad era for science has been a worse one for the mass media, the field in which,
despite the usual blunders and misjudgements, I was once proud to earn my living.
But I have spent too much time, in these last few years, being ashamed of my profession:
hence the note of anger which, I can now see, has crept into this essay even
though I was determined to keep it out. As my retirement changed to illness and then
to dotage, I would have preferred to sit back and write poems than to be known for
taking a position in what is, despite the colossal scale of its foolish waste, a very petty
quarrel. But when some of the climate priesthood, and even the Attorney General of
the United States, started talking about how dissent might be suppressed with the
force of law – well, that was a tipping point. I am a dissenter, and not because I deny
science, but because I affirm it. So it was time to stand up and fight, if only because
so many of the advocates, though they must know by now that they are professing a
belief they no longer hold, will continue to profess it anyway.
Back in the day, when I was starting off in journalism – on the Sydney Morning
Herald, as it happens – the one thing we all learned early from our veteran colleagues
was never to improve the truth for the sake of the story. If they caught us doing so, it
was the end of the world.
But here we are, and the world hasn’t ended after all. Though some governments
might not yet have fully returned to the principle of evidence-based policy, most of
them have learned to be wary of policy-based evidence. They have learned to spot
it coming, not because the real virtues of critical enquiry have been well argued by
scientists, but because the false claims of abracadabra have been asserted too often
by people who, though they might have started out as scientists of a kind, have found
their true purpose in life as ideologists. Modern history since World War II has shown
us that it is unwise to predict what will happen to ideologists after their citadel of
power has been brought low. It was feared that the remaining Nazis would fight on,
as Werewolves. Actually, only a few days had to pass before there were no Nazis to
be found anywhere except in Argentina, boring one another to death at the world’s
worst dinner parties.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, on the other hand, when it was thought
that no apologists for Marxist collectivism could possibly keep their credibility in the
universities of the West, they not only failed to lose heart, they gained strength. Some
critics would say that the climate change fad itself is an offshoot of this lingering revolutionary
animus against liberal democracy, and that the true purpose of the climatologists
is to bring about a world government that will ensure what no less a philanthropist
than Robert Mugabe calls ‘climate justice’, in which capitalism is replaced by
something more altruistic.
I myself prefer to blame mankind’s inherent capacity for raising opportunism to a
principle: the enabling condition for fascism in all its varieties, and often an imperative
mind-set among high end frauds. On behalf of the UN, Maurice Strong, the first
man to raise big money for climate justice, found slightly under a million dollars of it
sticking to his fingers, and hid out in China for the rest of his life – a clear sign of his
guilty knowledge that he had pinched it. Later operators lack even the guilt. They
just collect the money, like the Prime Minister of Tuvalu, who has probably guessed
by now that the sea isn’t going to rise by so much as an inch; but he still wants, for
his supposedly threatened atoll, a share of the free cash, and especially because the
question has changed. It used to be: how will we cope when the disaster comes? The
question now is: how will we cope if it does not?
There is no need to entertain visions of a vast, old-style army of disoccupied experts
retreating through the snow, eating first their horses and finally each other. But
there could be quite a lot of previously well-subsidised people left standing around
while they vaguely wonder why nobody is listening to them anymore. Way back there
in 2011, one of the Climategate scientists, Tommy Wils, with an engagingly honest
caution rare among prophets, speculated in an email about what people outside their
network might do to them if climate change turned out to be a bunch of natural variations:
‘Kill us, probably.’ But there has been too much talk of mass death already, and
anyway most of the alarmists are the kind of people for whom it is a sufficiently fatal
punishment simply to be ignored.
Nowadays I write with aching slowness, and by the time I had finished assembling
the previous paragraph, the US had changed presidents. What difference this transition
will make to the speed with which the climate change meme collapses is yet to
be seen, but my own guess is that it was already almost gone anyway: a comforting
view to take if you don’t like the idea of a posturing zany like Donald Trump changing
the world.
Personally, I don’t even like the idea of Trump changing a light bulb, but we ought
to remember that this dimwitted period in the history of the West began with exactly
that: a change of light bulbs. Suddenly, 100 watts were too much. For as long as the
climate change fad lasted, it always depended on poppycock; and it would surely be
unwise to believe that mankind’s capacity to believe in fashionable nonsense can be
cured by the disproportionately high cost of a temporary embarrassment. I’m almost
sorry that I won’t be here for the ceremonial unveiling of the next threat. Almost certainly
the opening feast will take place in Paris, with a happy sample of all the world’s
young scientists facing the fragrant remains of their first ever plate of foie gras, while
vowing that it will not be the last.
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