Swivel-eyed eco-loons

In the last ten years there has been (a) an alarming rise (b) a slight but significant rise or (c) no statistically significant change in global mean temperature. Actually, the answer is (c) but if the one you gave was (a) or (b) I’m hardly surprised. How could it not be when pretty much all they show on TV are programmes with titles like Climate Change: Britain Under Threat (BBC1, Sunday) and Should I Really Give Up Flying? (BBC2, Wednesday).

Climate change is happening, on this almost everybody agrees. But what there is definitely not general agreement on is the speed at which temperatures will rise, nor yet on when they will stop rising, nor whether we are in a position to do anything about it other than damage limitation, nor even the degree to which man-made pollution is or isn’t responsible.

Why, then, do eco-doom-mongers like Al Gore and George Monbiot persist in claiming that it’s a done deal, that we’ve only about ten seconds to save the world from total and utter man-made devastation, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is a nutter or a stooge in the pay of Big Industry who frankly deserves to be eaten alive by the mutant killer cockroaches which will surely be all that’s left to inherit the earth once Climate Change Cataclysm has happened?

Well, I’ll tell you. It’s because the sooner they can persuade the world that the debate is over, the sooner they’ll be able to inflict on us their self-hating, breast-beating, hair-shirt agenda, viz: every upland beauty spot to be destroyed by windfarms; 4 x 4 owners to be fed to starving polar bears stranded on melting ice floes; Mukharabat-style torture blocks to be built for householders who flout stringent recycling laws; the Western capitalist economy to be dragged back to the agrarian age; all meat to be phased out and replaced by tofu by 2025; etc.