EnviroSpin Watch

The real climate-change correlation.....

First, an apology: over the last couple of weeks my poor, limited brain has been full to overflowing with debates and broadcasts, and there has been no room in it for blogs of any value. Mental exhaustion housed my computer mouse, much, I am sure, to the delight of the febrile world.

At last, however, I feel there is, once again, just enough space in my tiny cranium to permit me to return to continue to discourse (more and more wearily, I must admit) on 'Wallace and the Curse of the Green Bunny'. Smile please: "Cheeeese!"

Yet, to be fair, I don't think that my lack-lustre performance is entirely down to my own senilifying neurons. There is something in the air, a barely perceptible change, as yet, but a new and most interesting climate-change correlation: the more apocalyptic and silly the media has become about drowning polar bears, a Gulf Stream on 'the rocks', Bacardi freezers, or olive groves ["Who she?" Ed.] in Owdham, the more the public seems to be turning off and getting on with busy and complex lives (while keeping a genuine eye out for avian 'flu - they know 'bugs' are always the real threat). I suddenly sense, through sheer inertia, that there is less of a need to blog.

Strangely, the unrelenting propagation of media-confused climate apocalypses appears to be assisting down-to-earth common sense to return. We have started to look back into history and we have, inevitably, re-discovered that which had been lost at the turn of the Millennium - namely, a tale of constant, and often violent, environmental change. We are marvelling again at the magnitude of past calamities, which so clearly dwarf Katrina and even the dreadful Boxing Day tsunami. Suddenly, there is a sense of history abroad in the air.

There is also - and this is not just down to the Eeyore-like prognostications of one James Lovelock - a growing sense that there is damn all we can do about things, other than, as in the past, adapt to, and assist people to withstand, change. Moreover, this feeling is underscored by a near-universal recognition among politically-astute folk that the Kyoto Protocol has been a waste of time and effort, and that Mr. Blair et al. can do nowt to curb rising emissions. Only this week, it has become painfully clear that the ever-moralistic UK will itself miss its Kyoto targets by miles [EU: by kilometers], despite previous protestations to the contrary. People are not going to change their lifestyles either for dodgy apocalyptic apologias or for the authoritarian austeriotons and neo-puritan nut-eaters. After all, the future will fundamentally happen in China and India, Brazil and Mexico. Compost toilets are being flushed down the loo with a lot of other 'Green' rubbish, some of which is downright dangerous and misleading (e.g. the bottled water scam) - although a few of our metropolitan elite will continue to make such Sunday Colour Supplement choices because these are so expensive and thus so self-defining, my dear.

We are further plainly bemused (and increasingly cynical) about the range of climatic scenarios with which we are daily bombarded: during the last six months alone, Brits have been told that they will have to become Pingus and/or Mediterranean olive farmers, cope with drier and/or wetter winters, and face up to less and/or more biodiversity. "What the ..... use is that?" I hear good people explete. Quite.

But, lastly, and above all, there have been just too many 'states of fear', with the inevitable result that 'fear', as a Green Bunny weapon, is losing credibility. Indeed, bird 'flu is about the only Matilda-fire truly burning down the pier. I recently experienced two straw polls happily resulting in an overwhelming vote for the incineration of municipal solid waste [this, despite all the activist hype against incineration in the UK] and for letting the coast retreat under management. There was no 'fear' - just doughty British pragmatism.

And beneath all the Green rhetoric, the UK political parties ['the everything-to-everyperson' party - the Lib Dems - inevitably excepted] are well aware of such realities. Only this week, Zac Goldsmith, the eye candy of the Conservatives, seemed to hint that 'Green' taxes were, well, not quite the right thing. Way to go, Zac.

And how about this? On March 5, the BBC will launch its new blockbuster television series, 'Planet Earth', avoiding all the usual sledgehammer environmental messages that have bedevilled past productions. There will be no PC doom-mongering dragged in at the end. Bravo. Well done the Beeb. I can now watch the series with pleasure. Your climate chaos stuff is increasingly boring and ever-so 1990s.

The first signs of world weariness over the climate-change debate are thus surfacing in the UK. The mantra is spouted daily, but automatically and without conviction. When smoking is banned, the media merrily propose the mass take-up of outside patio heaters - and 'green education' won't alter this. The focus is increasingly, and rightly so, on energy for economic growth. Good Wife Stott, ever the first to ignore her husband's rantings and concerns, exemplifies this trend well, immediately turning off (or re-tuning) the radio and television the moment she hears those dreaded words: 'global warming'. Yawn. As a well-trained historian, she is all too aware that the myths of the ages change with, and like, the weather.

So it is: "Yep, climate's changing. It always has. So what, mate? Is that patio heater free?"

Philip, seeking sanity in an increasingly febrile universe. Sunday lunch first, of course! And my 'global-warming' experiment to grow a banana in The Area doesn't look too promising! Not a monkey - or banana - in sight! However, I can at least make paper from the brown leaves and be interviewed for a Sunday Colour Supplement..... "Prof. Stott designs his own christmas cards from banana leaves, thus saving the planet from going bananas." Lucinda Hessian-Bloomers reports..... In the meantime, why not colour in a Pingu?