Varying degrees of climate change idiocy

IF you believe it is possible for human beings to set the earth’s thermostat, try turning off just one active volcano. Maybe the UN can help you find the switch.

Last month Islamic terrorists slaughtered 130 innocent men and women, the youngest aged just 17, in a series of vicious attacks across Paris. More than 40,000 government leaders, negotiators and activists subsequently arrived in Paris to decide what the global temperature will be for people whose grandparents haven’t been born yet.

If you want to get an idea of exactly where political priorities are in 2015, the above paragraph is a pretty good place to start.

While delegates at the United Nations climate change conference were fussing over future carbon dioxide levels, workers at Paris’s Pere Lachaise cemetery met with a psychologist in order to deal with the trauma of rapidly organising dozens of burials.

Some of those killed had been attending a show at the Bataclan concert hall, not far from their final resting place.

Appropriately enough, the climate change conference kicked off with a speech from murderous Zimbabwean tyrant bastard Robert Mugabe, who isn’t exactly unfamiliar with large body counts. That includes his 91st birthday party earlier this year, which featured a feast of buffaloes, impalas and a baby elephant.

“Unless current trends are reversed, disaster stalks planet Earth,” Mugabe told the conference, before presumably heading for the French capital’s Parc Zoologique to see if it had a drive-through.

The head of the Australian Conservation Foundation Kelly O’Shanassy got by on slightly less exotic fare.

“Working on ACF’s political strategy while sipping Moet in Dubai,” she wrote on Facebook from the Emirates business class lounge during her trip to Paris. For dinner last night duck le orange and champagne,” O’Shanassy posted once she’d arrived, scoring valuable Turnbull innovation points for her spelling of duck a l’orange.

If you actually believe it is possible for human beings to set the earth’s thermostat, try turning off just one active volcano

Yet more champagne followed: “Meeting with President Tong of ­Kiribati tonight but early. What to do when you arrive early for your meeting in Paris. Go to the nearest bar of course.”

Of course. O’Shanassy removed those posts once they attracted negative attention, but the ACF boss shouldn’t have been embarrassed. Paris is a wonderful city for superhuman weather-changing bar-hoppers, particularly when you have armed security to protect you from that other little problem nobody wants to talk about.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Labor leader Bill Shorten dropped in on the City of Light during the conference’s early days, where Shorten called for ambitious climate targets.

“Malcolm Turnbull’s caught. He’s caught in the middle of the road on this,” Shorten said. “He’s playing in the traffic.”

"1.5 Degrees" in white neon is lit on the Eiffel Tower in the French capital, as the COP21 United Nations Climate Change Conference takes place / Picture: AFP

It later emerged that Shorten himself had previously been playing in traffic, smashing into two parked cars during an early-morning drive in Melbourne after spilling hot coffee on his lap.

Forget global warming; the Labor leader is suffering groinal warming, and there’s nothing the UN can do to stop it.

Once-burnt Bill and his pal Mal had left the important job of signing Australia up to a pointless climate agreement to Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, who delighted con artists and grifters worldwide by committing us to international carbon markets. These markets are so rife with corruption that they make Nigerian email scammers look like the Salvos by comparison. In between all the champagne and the end of conference celebrations, a rare moment of reality intruded courtesy of US Secretary of State John Kerry. Seeking to make a point about the need for international agreement on climate targets, the former presidential candidate instead outlined the utter futility of even trying to hit those targets.

“The fact is that even if every American citizen biked to work, carpooled to school, used only solar panels to power their homes, if we each planted a dozen trees, if we somehow eliminated all of our domestic greenhouse gas emissions, guess what — that still wouldn’t be enough to offset the carbon pollution coming from the rest of the world,” Kerry said.

“If all the industrial nations went down to zero emissions — remember what I just said, all the industrial emissions went down to zero emissions — it wouldn’t be enough, not when more than 65 per cent of the world’s carbon pollution comes from the developing world.”

Considering that the developing world isn’t about to stop developing, Kerry has presented the most cogent argument yet for a complete abandonment of any and all climate change legislation.

And if you think that this would be irresponsible, and that we owe it to ­future generations to reduce the entire planet’s temperature, think about this.

If you actually believe it is possible for human beings to set the earth’s thermostat, try turning off just one active volcano.

Just one. Maybe the UN can help you find the switch.

THE ANSWER IS BLOWING IN THE WINDIES

CURTLY Ambrose goes through the same agonising ritual at the start of every Test match. First the West Indies bowling coach gathers his team for a rousing on-field speech encouraging them to perform at their very best.

Then Ambrose retires to the dressing rooms and watches his team collapse. It happened again in the first Test against Australia in Hobart, where the Windies were beaten by an innings and 212 runs — the second-greatest losing margin in all Tests played between the two teams. This followed one of Ambrose’s more optimistic predictions. “At the end of the day when we beat Australia, then the reporters will have to change their tune,” he said. “We’re going to do much better than you think.”

Great call. The only larger losing margin occurred in the third Test in Brisbane 85 years ago, when the Australian team enjoyed a slight advantage due to the inclusion of one Donald Bradman. Then playing in just his 12th Test match, Bradman hit 24 boundaries in a rapid double century then spent the next three days watching the Australian bowlers twice dismantle their opponents.

Even against a Bradman-boosted Australia, however, the 1930 West Indians were at least able to drag the match out to a fourth day. No such luck for the current team, who didn’t even make it to the third day’s final break. Numerous factors are responsible for the West Indies’ decline as a cricket superpower, but it is striking how that decline has been at odds with the economic standing of the various nations that make up the West Indies.

During the 1970s and 1980s, when the West Indians were at their peak, the likes of Jamaica, Barbados and Antigua were economically stagnant — or much worse, in Jamaica’s case. Yet subsequent economic improvements run parallel to the Windies’ steep fall on the world’s cricket fields.

Compare this to India, which rose as a cricket power in almost lock-step with its stunning economic growth.

Perhaps there is no connection at all between economies and athletic performance, which is just as well, or else the only obvious path to a West Indian cricketing revival would be to put the Australian Greens in charge of the region’s finances. Sure, everybody will be out of work, but let’s see how many new Michael Holdings emerge. One small note of encouragement for the struggling West Indians. Back during that 1930-31 series, the West Indies lost the first four Test matches by margins of 10 wickets, an innings and 172 runs, an innings and 217 runs, and an innings and 122 runs. But they actually won the final Test by 30 runs.

This required a minor miracle: Bradman was removed for a second-innings duck, proving that anything is possible. Maybe Ambrose can use that information ahead of the second Test in Melbourne.