Clientology

What joy to be regaled by a junior climatologist on my train journey yesterday.  Fortunately her voice was crystal clear and carried from the front of the carriage all the way to the back where I sat, enraptured by her in-depth knowledge of the current shape of the ice sheet. How handy that piercing voice will come in when she is speaking at a Greenpeace rally to save the endangered wossname, or lobbying parliament for an increase in funding for the wind turbine forest. The best thing about listening to juvenile experts is that no matter how clever they are, no matter how well-informed they can seem to be, they can only ever see things through the narrow prism of their short experience.

This weak prism only splits the light into red and blue, left and wrong, while older eyes can access the full ROYGBIV of claim, counter-claim, causation, coincidence or plain old establishment, or anti-establishment bullshit. The absolute certainty of youth will, however, serve her well, allowing her to tap into the vast amount of resources being hurled at the subsidised, homogenised, diversified, packaged world of pointless studies – clientology.

The clientologist need not concern themselves with scientific rigour, engaged as they are purely with delivering to their client the conclusions paid for and backed up by other clientologists. Will my oblivious lecturer blossom into a boffin? Will she write learned peer-review papers about the peek-a-boo state of the Arctic ice? There is really no need; she already has the primary attribute for success and that is belief. Young people tend to believe in man-made climate change because they have been taught it as an undisputed fact for all of their lives.

But MMCC doesn’t need the predictable certainty of gravity when politicians the world over have been so successfully persuaded of its veracity by the climate change industry. So much so that when Ed Miliband childishly taunted David Cameron at Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday he had only to label some of his cabinet as climate change ‘deniers’ to force DC into blustering “I believe man-made climate change is one of the most serious threats this country and this world faces…“ effectively committing his government to spend ever more money we haven’t got, shadow-boxing the invisible enemy, instead of fixing the economy first.

If the UK were to immediately revert to a Stone Age existence, abandoning all industry, shutting down all the power stations and ceasing the extraction of oil and gas the only measurable change in the world would be another 63 million people starving. But no, whatever the truth of the man-made element of climate change the UK is determined to punch above its weight in buying into it. And that means parents should take heed.

Noel Coward might have sung “Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington” but today he’d be warning against the traditional career paths as well. Don’t push your sons and daughters towards measurable occupations, Mrs Worthington, they are all being done by foreign nationals these days. Doctors, nurses, builders, drivers, cleaners; don’t let them make anything, don’t send them into a world of concrete achievement where reward is based on performance. No, Mrs W, if you want your daughter to shine on an even bigger stage, put her into clientology.

Round here we call it 'Summer'.

“Get real on climate change” said Ed Miliband, signalling the way ahead. For the forseeable future the big money will be on producing reports that nobody dare challenge and an army of clientologists will be needed to tell governments exactly what they want to hear. I predict an upsurge of investment in ‘expert’ opinion, paying ever more money into an industry devoted primarily to increasing the approval rating of governments. Clientology has a proven recipe for success: Identify a problem, back it up with pseudo-science and statistics, extract even more money to formulate a solution and repeat until insolvent. Or is that just a load of ice sheet?