Two news items from the BBC’s six o’clock bulletin struck me
yesterday. For while they were both to do with climate, the first felt utterly false because of the words, whereas the second was suffused with truth via the images. Whatever particular readers may feel about my past spent in advertising (and for myself, I’m proud of it -so there) this is my home turf.
Staring back down to ground zero from somewhere near the top of the
evolutionary tree, it’s fairly obvious that we had eyes when we came out of
the sea millions of years ago, but we’ve had languages for reception by the
aural taxi doors for, at the very most, 40,000. As any social or commercial
researcher of opinion will tell you, the eyes have it: watch behaviour
carefully, and treat anything said with extreme caution.
The first news item (it was, of course, the lead) concerned the Climate
Change Agreement in Paris. There was the announcement that the
negotiations had “succeeded”. The crowd went wild. John Kerry said this was a moment when “we’ve all shown we can be smart”. The UK Climate Secretary said it was a significant moment. An Australian bloke with rising sentence-ends said it was an incredibly significant moment. David Cameron sent a message to say we had done our duty to future generations. President Obama also tweeted to say it was huge, without specifying what the Big Thing was. And Ban Ki Moon said a number of things, but his message was obscured by the inconsiderate way in which his speechwriters had given him endless l’s and r’s with which to
struggle.
But behind the high-fives and hype, I found myself noting two points: first, the question of how harmful (if it all) CO2 might be in the production of global temperature increases was not being addressed; and second, an awful lot of this so-called agreement was not obligatory….it was voluntary. There will be no police of any kind to monitor the former, and I do not doubt that people at all levels of government everywhere will fudge the latter.
Perhaps a suitable analogy might be an 18th century alchemist demanding
that all apothecaries everywhere must reduce their phlogiston production by 1.5%. I don’t know: I’m very happy for people to reduce CO2 as an insurance policy just in case unproven science turns out to be right….but I’m profoundly unhappy with the way in which contrarian opinion is ignored. In the absence of any real certainty, the Warmist fraternity falls back on the very high percentage of climatologists who agree with them. But as my JWT mate Vic from many years ago used to say, “Eat shit…five trillion flies can’t be wrong”.
Even as a fan of the BBC – purely on the basis that the obvious Turdcock alternative would remove what little civilisation we have left – I find it galling the way Auntie’s climate clones flatly refuse to even consider the possibility that these vainglorious scientists are wrong. Every anchor and science journalist refers to climate change and CO2 as the main cause as a done deal.
The second item up concerned the floods in the north west of England. And yes, I know this is weather not climate, but weather is a symptom of climate: I’ve never bought into the idea that the two are mutually exclusive, because it would be like saying that baseball isn’t sport. Climate, weather, whatever – the events in Cumbria and the surrounding area are to do with real human behaviour, not global 24/7 news stations’ bollocks-riddled rhetoric.
What we were shown was the anguish of broken businesses and individual
suffering being alleviated by mutualist communal values. This time – instead of near-pornographic news coverage of wringing hands and personal tragedy, we saw the positive reactions of local charities and neighbours adding up to at first rescue, and then the welcome return of optimism based on something more than remote, half-baked belief.
More than any other single event of the year 2015, this signalled for me the natural triumph of the caring community over the hypocrisy of unnatural pretensions of a global nature. Rather than being “All talk, no action”, it was anonymously effective. So the next time I drivel on about being a communitarian mutualist, think of the comparison I’m offering with globalist falsehood. If the descriptor makes me sound like Sloggy the tree-hugging fart recycler, well then that’s hard luck: the truth is there for all to see if they’d only step off the treadmill for a second….central government in league with neoliberal globalist claptrap simply cannot hold a light to the idea of smaller, entrepreneurial communities – at least, not for a fundamentally tribalist species like ours.
Last night here there was a weather front coming straight off the Russian steppes. The crystal clarity of the stars and the silent echo of sub-freezing air didn’t entirely compensate for the temperature being -5°C. My mum used to say, during winter, “It’s bitter out there”. The French call it ‘hard cold’. However one describes it, this level of winter kills those without
shelter. If the best we can do at this stage of our evolution is tell those without shelter to get on their bikes, or write cruelly puerile drivel for smug, callous tabloids, then it’s a very poor show.
And yes, Katie Hopkins, I’m talking about you. Silly tart.
Last night at The Slog: Why Syria affects everything and everyone everywhere
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