Dear climate zealots, whatever happened to healthy debate?
Fail to applaud the grandiose ambition to change the world’s climate and no matter how much you treasure nature, you’re treated as though you’re announcing a plan to pack the throats of loggerhead turtles with plastic bags.
A man goes to the GP for his test results. “Bad news, I’m afraid,” says the doctor, looking at his watch. “You’ve only got three minutes to live.”
“Three minutes?” the man cries. “Surely there’s something you can do for me?”
“Well I could boil you an egg,” says the doc.
I was put in mind of this delightful old joke last month by the lugubrious face of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres (an honorary doctor nine times over) as he introduced the latest increment of climate concern, announcing, with deadpan comic timing, that we have now entered “the era of global boiling”.
It wasn’t immediately apparent what precisely will be boiling if the Earth’s temperature increases by one or two degrees over the next century (the thermal equivalent, by my unscientific calculation, of moving from Sydney to Port Macquarie). The oceans? The planet itself? Molten rock as it flows out of a volcano looks inhospitable enough, but boiling? Ouch, that’s seriously warm. Are you proud of yourself, Antonio? The sight of a grown man spouting such drivel in an attempt to frighten the simpletons among us is as ludicrous as it is contemptible.
The irritating thing is that by pointing out that nonsense, countenancing even the slightest deviation from the alleged consensus, you are damned by the zealots. God forbid you should suggest, with Bjorn Lomborg, that it might be smarter – and cheaper – to adapt to whatever climatic perturbations might inconvenience us (as Alfred Wainwright, who wrote the definitive walking guides to England’s Lake District, used to say, “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing”). Fail to applaud and indulge the grandiose ambition to change the world’s climate and no matter how much you treasure and respect nature, you’re treated as though you’re announcing a plan to pack the throats of loggerhead turtles with plastic bags.
What happened to civilised debate, the tacit agreement that it’s possible for decent, thoughtful people to hold a different view from yours that isn’t motivated by malice? We see the same attitude towards those who question the wisdom of establishing a permanent Constitutional voice as the most effective mechanism to address Indigenous disadvantage. Much easier to dismiss them as racists than engage with their arguments.
Meanwhile, follow the money back to the cynical beneficiaries – ni hao, Xi Jinping! – of our misplaced pieties. In Scotland, it was revealed this month, 16 million trees – you know, the tall, pretty things that soak up the carbon dioxide Antonio is worried about – have been cut down to make way for Chinese-built wind farms. Saving the planet; just not the wooden bits. Or here, where we scythe vast corridors through native bush and across lovingly tended farmland to accommodate transmission lines for “renewable” energy projects. (These are designed to spare us from using the coal and iron ore we’ve just dug up and sent thousands of kilometres so an environmentally irresponsible communist state can turn them into wind turbines, solar panels and electric cars, and sell them back to us at an inflated price; who could fault that logic?)
Sorry Antonio, but it pains me to say I find it increasingly difficult to summon up any respect for politicians and their lemming-like schemes these days. Perhaps it’s a function of a lifetime in this job. One of the downsides of the otherwise amusing trade of journalism is that it can, if your attention slips for a moment, put you in unpleasant proximity to our political class, who, with a few rare exceptions, are deeply unimpressive people, unremarkable for anything beyond their family-size vanity and unwarranted self-belief.
Or maybe this disenchantment is a broader, unadvertised side-effect of growing old, a creeping disappointment as you watch charlatans and liars stuff themselves for decades at the trough of public office, then anoint equally talentless sycophants to replace them on the never-ending carousel of lucrative uselessness.
As for Antonio’s brooding message of doom, it will come true one day, but not just yet. Astrophysicists predict the Earth will be a cinder block, its atmosphere boiled away by a red-giant Sun, in four billion years or so; but even though I’m determined to moderate my drinking, I’m not confident I’ll still be around to see it.
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