The Name of the Beast

The more measured and sane commentators have taken care to distinguish between weather and climate and between prevention (which is impossible) and mitigation (which is expensive but necessary) when discussing the events of the last week and the devastation and disruption to thousands caught up in the northern floods. But what a bumper festive season it has been for the rent-seekers; the lobbyists, the propagandists, the commentators and the chattering classes, all demanding ever more unearned income to maintain their own lifestyles at the expense of and with no gain to those swept away by the torrent of ideology.

It took no time at all for LBC to wheel out world renowned climate expert, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, to discuss ‘the serious reality of climate change’ on Stig Abell’s show. A plethora of Greens exposed their pale complexions to the harsh spotlights of willing broadcast media, all too ready to give them a platform. And later, Sky News invited yet another famously non-partisan scientist, George Monbiot, as a credible interpreter of the causes of the deluge and its cure. Then yet another giant of meteorology and ecology, the actor Michael Sheen, ‘guest-edited’ the Today Programme and squarely put the blame on those asking for help.

As always, those lost in the background noise emanating from all these empty vessels are the very people who need action, not words. The resources are here for recovery – our armed forces were ready as ever to knuckle down and do what a politician will never do; get their hands dirty. There is also money, plenty of money, but much of it goes to grease the wheels of commerce in corrupt foreign lands; buying limousines for thugs with private armies to subjugate their own people. But what was missing – what is always missing – was simple pragmatism, stripped of dogma and ready for action.

Whether we are responsible for progressive climate change is irrelevant. Naming every other Atlantic depression as Storm Frank Spencer or whatever, in a bid to make people believe they are witnessing extreme events is irrelevant. Whether increased CO₂ warms or, as is increasingly being suggested, cools the planet is irrelevant. How large our Green taxes rise is irrelevant. A single large volcanic eruption, impossible to predict with current techniques, can result in worldwide weather disruption way in excess of any forecasts for anthropogenic climate change for several years. The El Niño-Southern Oscillation and its contrary sister La Niña are complex, difficult to forecast, entirely natural climatic events which have been blamed for truly extreme weather... usually after the event.

Don't pay the Ferryman!

Extreme weather is a feature of planet Earth and any effect that human activity has or may have is minimal and has proved elusive to determine, with each set of data the ‘facts’ are made to fit the delirious and hysterical beliefs of converts to the Church of Climate Change. And of course, what better source of converts than those affected? Why would you not say you believe if it helps bring much-needed relief? The beast walks among us in sheep’s clothing - an iron fist in a velvet glove - and its propaganda is pure genius; any adverse weather can be used to summon it. To surrender your soul to the beast, all you have to do is say its name. 

Climatemongery

All right, I don’t usually blog on a Saturday but I’ve just been listening to climate mong-supreme, Chris Smith talking to sycophants Ken Livingstone and David Mellor on LBC’s morning show. It appears that La Smith, the big gay lord with a cartoonist’s sketch for a face is standing his flooded ground. I hope he has waders because this shit is going to get deeper. (Yes, yes, ad hominem attack but fuck it - it's what they do all the time.)

He blathered on about there being a definite, established pattern of more extreme weather due to climate change when even the most pimple-faced, juvenile ‘perfessor’ of climate propaganda isn’t so stupid as to make that claim. It’s filtered through to government too, with any number of MPs from the Prime Minister down blithely trotting out the line that yes, the climate is changing and yes, it’s mankind’s fault and yes, there is no doubt in their minds that recent over-reported extreme weather is proof of all this.

The outrageous Aussie communist Natalie ‘Gordon’ Bennett from the Green Party has even gone so stupidly far as to call for every climate change sceptic throughout the land to be sacked from any position of influence. So much for free speech, the allowance of differing opinion and well, for simple common sense. No doubt under a Green Government we would all wear the same environmentally friendly hemp sack-cloth and ashes and go about self-flagellating and apologising to Gaia while subsisting off lentils and sheltering in cave-communes between our shifts toiling to maintain Wildlife Refuge UK.

But hey, let’s ignore the unsettled science that says there is no pattern – for heaven’s sake just like economics NOBODY knows – and apply a modicum of calm and reason. Let’s ignore the lumbering state-funded quangos and think tanks and activists and above all ‘thinkers’ and let's turn instead to the ‘doers’. Instead of endlessly debating whether or not it’s real and spending £Billions on paying overstuffed bureaucrats to play pass the parcel with policy, why not draw a line under the whole fiasco and get real?

Cut Green funding right now. All of it. Stop penalising businesses, stop loading the energy prices and stop the fuck out of the green gravy train. Pay wind-farmers the market rate for the energy they generate and not a penny more. Hold them to contribution contracts and penalise them when the wind doesn’t blow, just like with any other service industry. If it’s viably economically they will survive – but while they are doing the sums (Prediction: not one single large scale turbine will ever be erected henceforth) let’s get busy saving the country.

Build new power stations, frack for gas, consider coal reserves. Patch up the potholes and repair the railways and where it is appropriate, traditional and right to do so, dredge the waterways, re-forest the hillsides and build flood defences and sea walls and, in short, put the British people first. Create employment based on real, practical things that cost a fraction of what it costs to pay for ideology and utterly relegate the climate debate to a sideshow.

Do this for ten years and restore this crumbing country to some semblance of dignity and then – and only then, when we fixed the things we CAN fix – see if there has been any provable man-made climate change in the meantime. If unequivocally there is, if the currently far from undisputed science can finally show a genuine link, Little Britain will have contributed sweet-FA to it compared to China, Asia and the USA, but at least we won’t have wasted another ten years imagining we did. And at least we will be ready.