The very ordinary end of the world.

Not much of any importance to say this evening. I’ve been looking for story ideas and Halloween prank possibilities. The trouble with story ideas is that no matter what horrible thing I think up, something worse is already happening. How am I supposed to scare a world that is intent on scaring itself? It’s going to have to be big and it’s going to have to be ordinary. Twisting the ordinary is scarier than any amount of gore.

Something the Church of Climatology are well aware of. For years they have harped on about the Arctic ice melting in the Northern Hemisphere summer and switched to Antarctic ice melting in the Southern Hemisphere summer. The Arctic/Antarctic switch is about due, in fact. They will be silent on the Arctic while it freezes over again and they’ll be back to it in the Northern spring. They think nobody has noticed because their idiot drones never have.

Every hurricane is due to global warming now. Every dry spell and every cold snap. Every inch of rainfall, every flood, every drought. All things that have happened over and over in just the fifty-odd years I’ve been here and many, many times before I arrived.

The rule is simple: if it fits the mantra, it’s man-made climate change. If it does not fit the mantra, ‘weather is not climate’. All their drones are fully indoctrinated with this mindless crap.

So it is no surprise to find that they greet another perfectly normal event with cries of ‘Climate change! We caused this!‘

Every walrus on the planet is thinking ‘What? Who are you? We’re busy doing what we always do. Just go away.’

Every Climatologist on the planet is thinking ‘If we could get the blubbery ones off the beach, we could con another daft bunch of politicians into paying us a fortune to put up useless bird-mincers there’. By ‘blubbery ones’, I’m talking about walruses, not Brighton, before anyone gets all offended and starts throwing their weight around.

The walruses were first observed flobbing up onto beaches and dropping their towels onto sun loungers as far back as 1604. The walruses beat the English to those sun loungers that time. The English are just too slow with a towel, it seems. You guys really need to know where your towel is.

It’s just another ordinary thing. Another thing that happens on the planet. In fact, the massive number of walruses fighting over sun loungers this year is surely a great success story for the conservationist wing of the Church of the Green God? Not so. It is a scary thing, a Halloween weather report in which the little cloud and sun stickers are replaced with images of skulls, ebola virus and Satan. Oh, and walruses. Climate change means we will be overwhelmed by walruses until even the Germans can’t get a sun lounger. We might even all turn into walruses. I think there are some already undergoing the transition, you know. Goo goo g’joob.

I still struggle to reconcile the evolution (everything must change or we’re doomed) wing with the conservationist (everything must stay the same or we’re doomed) wing of this whole charade, you know.

Speaking of doomed, next time they call me for jury service, if selected, I will look the defendant in the eye, grin, clap my hands together and say ‘Aye, laddie, ye’re dooomed‘. That should get me banned for life.

Those windmill things are all well and good in private hands. Quite a few local farms have had one windmill each for years now, and they put them on top of a hill. It helps keep the farm running when snow brings down power lines, not an uncommon event in this part of the world.

The thing is, it’s the farmer’s land it’s on, and the farmer’s money that bought the windmill. We’re not paying for it. We don’t have to maintain it. It’s none of our business.

There used to be some delightfully picturesque land around Glasgow. It’s now covered in white whirling monsters that we do pay for, each on several hundrend tons of concrete and producing enough electricity to power an ecobulb or two. No wonder they banned filament bulbs. Turn on one of those and a windmill burns out.

This planet is not going to die. It is extraordinarily arrogant of us to think we can kill it.

Look at Mars. Still there, caring not a jot for anything alive or even robotic on its surface. At the other end of the scale is Venus, actively destroying anything with the temerity to try to touch it. The Russian Venera probes managed to take a few photos before Venus squished them, but Venus is still there. Still going about its sun-orbiting business like a planetary version of an old git.

There will be life on Earth when humans have all scared themselves to death. Angst-ridden cockroach civilisations perhaps, or slightly worried axolotls who can’t quite work out what they are worried about, but who constantly worry that they are worried about something. All this ‘we must care about the Earth’ misses one very important point.

Earth does not care about us. We’re not the nazz. We’re just a buzz. Some kind of… temporary. (Free book to the first one to tell me which song and album I stole that line from).

To the planet, we are but a henna tattoo. Something it wears for a while and then lets it fade when it gets bored of us. We are not important. If you rent, does your landlord care about you? If you are buying, does the mortgage lender care about you? No. So why should you expect the space-rock that you live on and eat from for free to care about you at all? You are a tick, a flea, a louse. Sucking on a host you pretend to want to be tick-free.

Man-made anything is easily absorbed by the planet. Nothing we do is forever. It is a mark of extraordinary arrogance and self-absorption to think otherwise.

So I’m off to think of something more to scare the drones. They like it. They want to be scared to death.

They think it iwll save the planet…