Is Prince Charles ill-advised, or merely idiotic?

I do wish the Prince of Wales weren’t such a terrible prat because then I wouldn’t have to say it in print and quite ruin my chances of a knighthood. But he is a prat. A dangerous prat at that — as he reminded us yet again just the other day in a speech he gave to ‘business leaders’ at St James’s Palace about what he thinks is happening with ‘climate change’.

He said: ‘It has been profoundly depressing to witness the way the so-called climate sceptics are apparently able to intimidate all sorts of people from adopting the precautionary measures necessary to avert environmental collapse. For too long we have treated the planet like a perpetual cash machine which doles out money without there ever being any need to check the bank balance. But now finally the money is running out.’

There are so many idiocies, false assumptions, inversions of the truth and malevolent yearnings in just that one paragraph that I’m not sure where to begin. The phrase ‘so-called climate sceptics’, for example. What exactly is the Prince suggesting that the rational, decent empiricists who oppose global climate change alarmism ought to be called instead? Is ‘deniers’ perhaps the word he’s straining for? Or would he prefer something a little more robust? Untermenschen, maybe.

And these ‘all sorts of people’ who have been intimidated, surely he can’t mean those corrupt, mendacious, bullying scientists who were exposed in the Climategate emails breaching FOI laws, fantasising about beating up their opponents, conspiring to smear scientists who disagreed with them and to close down journals which published their work. Sounds like those thugs are quite capable of looking after themselves, not to mention their generous grant funding.

The ones being intimidated, surely, are the very ones opposing those ‘precautionary’ measures — on the not unreasonable grounds that the scientific evidence for the need to introduce them remains piteously thin.