Why Climate Change Doesn’t Matter
It was fun to read, in a recent edition of The Spectator, James Delingpole’s rant about how pro-climate changers have infiltrated the Bank of England’s PR department (or whatever else you want to call it), and covertly prostituted its cast-iron, constitutional guarantee of trustworthiness for the sake of the nation’s bleeding, and by a couple of points a year, warming hearts. And how doubly shocking therefore was the Bank’s betrayal of us Brits, especially us (them, in my case) Brexit lemmings. It was almost fun to hear him attacking cronyism, a recruitment principle of which he himself is without any doubt a beneficiary. What he fails to realise — what seemingly everybody you read on the subject fails to realise — is that, whether the planet is warming up or not, and whether the grasping vandal that is homo sapiens is or is not responsible, everybody involved in the debate is on essentially the same side: the wrong one.
As his views on the profounder side of life so often do, an observation by Woody Allen provides a context that proves revelatory. And oh, how frequently does context alone settle our little local problems? Frequently, if not always. Allen was once asked whether he wished to achieve immortality through his work. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I wish to achieve immortality by not dying.’ Absurd, of course. But deliberately so. What Mr Allen was mocking was Man’s thoughtless assumption of his own immortality. Of course, it’s been going on for years — a couple of hundred thousand of them — and although I suspect that switched-on, science-savvy climate geeks are, as a body, more likely to dismiss as nonsense an infinite post-mortem ecstasy in some angelic realm above, they have still not got out of the immortality habit. Nor have their opponents. That’s what puts them both on the same side. It’s the side that espouses futility as the recipe for a fulfilled life.
You can see the futility everywhere. Ridiculous diets, gym regimes, jogging, countless fads and wonder drugs plus, at the Gwyneth Paltrow end of the scale, crystals, aromas, flasks of homeopathically treated water, to which, like orange squash, all you need to do is add water. Now we should add esoteric medical treatment, preferably Eastern, factor in the Human Spirit, capitalised, and, not unusually, the Soul. All of which leaves us just one step away from Global Warming, even if that step is several hundred years old and the ideology that supported it was quite fond of burning its critics alive. I refer to geocentricism, the fairly widespread religious view that the Earth lay, indeed lies, at the centre of the universe.
But what is the link between Gwnyeth Paltrow and anyone, simply anyone, who involves himself with any seriousness, on one side, on the other, or on the fence, in the global warming debate? As Woody indicated, as Gwyneth forgets, as sea temperatures are measured, as corals wither, as great whites cruise off Cornwall, as Antarctica begins its almost infinitely slow preparation to welcome back monkeys, and whatever we decide to do, we’ve had it anyway. Our supreme self-absorption is encapsulated in the sort of call to action that apparently anybody can get away with these days: Boris’s mendacious charabanc invited us to vote leave and save the NHS, just as, at several orders of mendacity greater, we are invited by millions of the well-meaning to save the planet.
Thus are the fates of a relatively recent arrival species-wise and a medium-sized rocky planet conflated. Homo sapiens is very likely to be something of a flash-in-the-pan, probably a very poor second to the dinosaurs. In geological terms, tinkering with wind-farms — and absolutely everything else on the carbon-reduction agenda — might, scaled up, make a difference to us of a couple of seconds in a week. The planet, however, has several billion years left to rotate its way around the sun. It is in no danger whatsoever.
But you do have to hand it to Boris Marketing. There is no doubt that the NHS issue played well with the shallower body politic. It moved them. And in just the same way, Save the Planet, plays well when a government wants to raise a few taxes. Saving the Planet moves us. What fair-minded and honourable person could possibly object to protecting, preserving and stumping up the taxes to pay for two such noble causes? Unless they were fairy tales?
John Varnom July 2017