Climate alarmists cop a Clive James savaging

Iconic, ailing Australian satirist Clive James has penned a savage essay on climate change alarmism.

Author Clive James at his home in London.

Iconic, ailing Australian satirist Clive James has penned a savage essay on climate change alarmism, controversially cooking everyone from Barack Obama to Kevin Rudd to Tim Flannery to Al Gore to Donald Trump in the boiled and rising ocean of his wit.

In the excoriating essay, Mass Death Dies Hard, published exclusively today in The Weekend Australian, James calls the former US president “the most exalted of all the world’s predictors of the Great Barrier Reef’s death, who has still not seen the reef”, while his successor is a “posturing zany” brought to power in a “dim-witted period in the history of the West”. He calls Mr Gore a “C-student to his marrow” and dubs the former Labor prime minister a climate “chorister”.

“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,” James writes of Mr Rudd.

He calls the distance between climate scientist Tim Flannery and a TV camera a dangerous space.

“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,” James writes. “He is far more likely to go on being, and wishing to be, one of the mass media’s mobile oracles about climate.”

But the most pointed ends of his barbs are reserved for climate debate crimes against his beloved English language: the “language of artificial crisis” and hyperbolic doom-speak he fears has infected mass media and excluded ­“rational critical enquiry” from the debate.

“When the politicians join in the writing, the dramatic language declines to the infantile,” James says.

“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.”

As Mr Trump was pulling out of the Paris climate accord yesterday, James was giving The Weekend Australian a rare insight into the genesis of his brief literary dive into the murky and politically charged waters of climate science.

“A few too many people said I knew nothing about the subject, but they said it on a day when it became evident that they knew even less,” he writes. “After Obama’s ­attorney-­general (Loretta Lynch) blithely announced that she was thinking of investigating unsatisfactory organisations, I thought she might soon start investigating unsatisfactory people.”

Reports emerged early last year the US Department of Justice discussed possibly pursuing civil ­action against so-called climate change sceptics.

“That kind of initiative needed nipping in the bud, in my opinion,” says James, who has only just returned from receiving his regular immunoglobulin enhancements in Addenbrooke’s Hospital near his home in Cambridge where the 77-year-old author of more than 40 acclaimed published works of poetry, memoir, fiction and criticism is slowly dying inside a body riddled with leukaemia, emphysema and carcinomas.

“The whole piece was written at my kitchen table, sometimes by day, usually by night.

It took months, and by the time it was finished there was a new president, who, although a lot crazier than any loon, just happens to be more sane on this subject than his predecessor.

It was very interesting that ­Hillary Clinton, in the debates, barely mentioned Trump’s retreat from the climate theme. I thought that meant that her party had ­retreated too.”

The “giant wombat” line regarding Professory Flannery, he says, “has been thundering in my head ever since a certain Australian climate expert predicted that Queensland would run out of water shortly before that state was inundated”.

“I still hear the wombat in the night and wake shaking,” he writes. “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 it was time to stand up and fight.

“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.”