Killing yourself to live

Okay, the Freddo competition still hasn’t happened because I’m dealing with two novels and a short story collection while preparing for visitors and getting ready for a short trip to Denmark and battling a garden that looks like Chthulu’s extended family rising in the rain.

Nobody noticed the last one so this time it’s up front. Where did I steal the title from? Band, album, year. And what did the song actually reference? Up for grabs – a print copy of ‘you’ll be fine’ plus a bit of Leg Iron Books crappy merchandise – which is not on general sale so far. First answer in the comments gets it. The book is a funny one, not a scary one.

Right. To the real point. The Green God and the Church of Climatology.

I have argued with them on Twitter but no longer. There’s no point and it’s too late anyway. They call me ‘climate denier’, the new word for ‘heretic’. They believe what the High Priests of Alleged Science tell them, they believe in The Models (the digital version of a remarkably inaccurate religious book) and they talk of nothing but the End of Days unless we all live as they direct. No discussion is allowed, the ‘science’ is settled and is now Gospel.

And they scoff in smug self-righteousness when I call it a religion. Then they want me burned at the stake for heresy.

Well, the real truth is that there has been no global warming for twenty years and we are now in a sharp cooling period because the Grand Solar Minimum is already underway. The Apocalypse has indeed started and the Church of Climatology has made it far worse than it needed to be. We could have adapted, as we have in the past, but that option is now deleted for most people.

Let’s put my positions on the line.

Climate : The climate changes. All the time. It does this in cycles, a complex set of cycles with big cycles of hot and cold overlying a shorter warm/cool cycle. Anyone my age knows this because we have experienced it.

In the first few years of the 2000’s I could grow six foot tall tobacco plants outdoors. I live well north of Aberdeen. It was legal back then, it’s not legal any more but it doesn’t matter because I’d struggle to grow tomatoes in a greenhouse this year. In those years I’d have to use an electric fan indoors because even opening a window was no use – there was no air movement for weeks and the air outside was hotter than inside anyway.

In the early 1980s I went out to drive to work and couldn’t find my car. All I saw was a row of white mounds along both sides of the street. Deep snow in between them, deep snow on the pavement. I walked in to work and it turned out not many others had bothered.

About eight years ago we had two successive winters that started in October and continued into May the following year. It wiped out my fish pond and gave me cracked ribs because it would get just above freezing in the day and then freeze again at night. So every outside surface was frictionless. You just could not walk on it. Especially after a few whiskies.

Last winter was pretty mild by comparison. The one before wasn’t. The next one might or might not be. It is not warming. Human activity is not affecting climate. We are just not that important.

Pollution : This is always a bad thing. Plastic islands at sea (tell me which song that line came from and I’ll send you a copy of the next book I publish) are always, always a very bad thing. It should not be happening. We nag our teenagers to clean their rooms while we bung plastic into the ‘recycle’ bins which are really nothing more than a magic portal to the middle of the Pacific.

Yes, I know, most plastic enters the sea from rivers in China and Africa but that’s because we send our recycling there to be processed. It’s not their own waste they are dumping. It’s ours. Anyway it’s changing, China at least has had enough of getting blamed for this.

Overall though, apart from plastics, pollution has been declining. Vehicle engines are a lot cleaner than they used to be, there is a lot to do still with cargo ships who pump out more pollution than all the cars, trucks and buses in the world. They should be fitted with sails as well as engines – free propulsion, with no emissions, when the wind is in the right direction – but why should they? Greenpeace ships don’t do this. They all run on diesel.

Factories don’t produce smog in London any more although some places still have that problem.

Green driving? Sure, it works great in town and that’s where it’s needed. A high concentration of vehicles produces concentrated traffic fumes. Replacing most of them with electric or hydrogen fuel is going to make a big difference.

However, for long journeys it’s not viable. Imagine waiting for a delivery when the large truck bringing it has to stop-over for 12 hours or more to recharge. Imagine driving across country when that ten minute stop to refuel becomes a few hours of recharging your little car. If you can find somewhere with a charging point. And… where do you think that electricity comes from?

Still, if you live in a city and don’t want to drive long distance, all you need is an electric car to get to the shops and back. I’d be okay with that as long as it doesn’t ramp up fuel prices for people in the countryside, like me, who live half an hour’s drive fom the nearest shops and whose electricity supply can be shut off by a lightning strike.

I drive a 4×4 because anything that isn’t 4×4 isn’t going to get to this house in winter. I do not drive it for any kind of showing-off, I drive it because it is necessary. Sure it has emissions but there are combine harvesters and tractors here. Even their emissions don’t produce enough to taint the air. My little 4×4 is making no difference. It is not like the cities those who moan about ‘clean air’ live in. It’s the place where ‘clean air’ is normal.

There is a lot we can do about all forms of pollution and really, a lot of it has been or is being done already.The biggest problem pollution control faces is that it is now linked to climate change when they are actually totally different things. Yes, we should get the plastic out of the oceans but no, it does not affect climate.

And so we come to those killing themselves to live.

Maisy Rohrer, a 22-year-old developmental researcher at New York University, has been struggling to cope with climate change for years. “I guess the despair started when I was 18, and I began learning about how much the earth was changing, and I’d have full-blown panic attacks about the arctic sea ice melting, and the polar bears starving, and I’d call my mom telling her life was pointless,” she said. She believed at the time that the human race “should be wiped out.”

But… if she believes climate change will do that, what’s the problem?

“I became very suicidal, and a large part of my justification for feeling like I’d be better off dead was that humans are hurting the Earth so much, and I as one person [couldn’t] make enough of a positive impact so it would be better if I were not around to cause any more damage,” Rohrer said.

This is what the Church of Climatology has done. No hope, no redemption, only despair. Unlike every other religion there is no way out for the followers of this one. They have no Heaven or Hell, only oblivion and no hope of changing it unless… everyone follows their religion.

You think Islam is a bit strict? Islam is a summer hayride compared to the Green God’s religion. At least in Islam you still have a chance of Heaven by killing unbelievers. In the Church of Climatology, unless every single person on the planet believes, everyone will die with no Heaven, no redemption, nothing but rotting corpses on sun-baked sidewalks. Even if everyone does believe… it’s the same.

Gritty Thunderbird, the latest wheeled-out child advocate, is now dictating climate policy to the idiots in charge. Yes, I know, I’m ‘attacking a child’ and that is the reason they use children. Any dissent is ‘attacking a child’, in this case an Asperger’s child with well orchestrated hair braids. She looks so innocent and naieve and unfortunately, she is.

She is being used and abused by the Church of Climatology in the most disgusting way possible and yet criticising the message she has been fed is ‘attacking her’.

I do not attack her. She is a child and she is being used. The message she relays is lies. She does not know this. She has been convinced of it by much darker forces. One day she will realise and on that day she is going to feel things nobody should ever be made to feel. I sympathise, but sending lies through a child is not going to silence me.

Barmy Prince Charlie has been out with this crap too. ‘We have 18 months to save the world’. Oh dear. We’ve had a few years to Armageddon since the 1950s and nothing at all has changed. Well to be fair, in the 1970s, rising CO2 was going to cause an ice age, now rising CO2 is going to cause warming. Why?

Because that’s the only thing they can tax.

You know what rising CO2 really does? It makes plants grow faster. It’s currently 0.04% of the atmosphere and all plants on the planet use it in photosynthesis. Reduce it to zero and all the plants – every one of them from giant redwood to dandelion – dies. And then so does everything else.

Increase it and the planet gets greener.

So, Steering a large asteroid into the plent is prohibitively expensive and very difficult, or so I am told.

Erasing 0.04% of the atmosphere can be done if someone has enough money to buy the right chemicals and place large batches of them in the right places.

Bill Gates once said he wanted to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide to zero. He has the money to do it.

And I have the know-how.

Hey, Bill…