Never mind the planet – save our sanity

I ought to have known that, when it comes to our politicians, no rock bottom exists. Even if it did, our governors would somehow find an even lower level to which they could sink.

To wit: not only did a minister of the Crown agree to talk to Greta Thunberg, a mentally unstable Swedish girl fanatically spouting voguish rubbish, but – and I swear I’m not making this up – he actually apologised to her for the Industrial Revolution.

When young Greta told Michael Gove that Britain had accrued “a mind-blowing carbon debt” over the 200 years following the Industrial Revolution, any responsible adult would have told her to stop talking nonsense, take a quick number one and go to bed.

Instead, our Secretary for the Environment said: “As I listened to you I felt great admiration but also a sense of responsibility and guilt because I recognise I am of your parents’ generation. I recognise we have not done nearly enough to deal with the problem of climate change.”

The previous day Greta, all pig tails and the glistening eyes of a dangerous fanatic, addressed Her Majesty’s Parliament. To give you an idea of the general level of her audience, let me remind you that within that august body Mr Gove is seen as a conservative (!) intellectual (!!!).

Hence it’s no surprise that they allowed the disturbed youngster to lecture them on the facts of natural life, most of which aren’t facts but ignorant rants.

“We just want people to listen to the science,” declared the poor girl, without specifying which particular science people ought to listen to.

The implicit claim is that all scientists support Greta’s extravagant claims as absolutely true and universally valid. However, that simply isn’t the case.

In fact, such claims are mainly supported by scientists who receive climate-change grants from the UN and its affiliated institutions. Those who haven’t been blessed by the laying on of UN hands tend to evaluate the issue of anthropogenic global warming more critically.

Actually, we know that some 80 per cent of climate change, one way or the other, is due to solar activity that has nothing to do with anything man does on ‘our planet’. We also know that the graph of global temperature has had peaks and troughs throughout history.

For example, when Julius Caesar conquered the Tin Islands, grapes grew abundantly in Scotland, which suggests a climate somewhat different from what it is now. Yet I don’t think the Scots overindulged in aerosol sprays and air travel.

Also, non-UN scientists have identified the Medieval Warm Period lasting from about 950 to 1250 AD, when global temperatures were higher than they are now, though the carbon footprint was rather lower.

It’s also true that any serious attempt people have ever made to feed and clothe themselves has resulted in some release of heat. This happens, for example, during extensive agriculture, when the soil is turned over.

So I’d like to take this opportunity and apologise to the unhinged girl for the anonymous inventor of the plough all those centuries ago, who unfortunately doesn’t sit in Parliament and thus can’t apologise for himself.

In general, science should be left to scientists. Let those qualified to study such issues in sufficient depth do so, publish results in arcane journals and then get together at conferences and try to reach a consensus.

However, the problem of climate change (they no longer say ‘global warming’, having found out that science invalidates that term) has been taken out of scientists’ hands. It has been transferred into the sweaty palms of young fire-eating revolutionaries who have to channel their destructive, nihilist impulses into some sort of conduit.

Communism provided one of those for a few decades, but all those photographs of piled corpses and skeletal concentration camp inmates have made it somewhat less productive.

Yet, as the First Law of Thermodynamics tells us, energy doesn’t disappear; it simply transforms into another kind of energy. Thus much of the same animus has been alternately bursting into other channels: anti-nuke today, animal welfare tomorrow, homomarriage the day after, climate change the day after that.

Never mind the cause, feel the energy, seems to be the general rule. The young, whom the Satanist-in-Chief Trotsky called ‘the barometer of the nation’, are ideal agents of upheavals, what with their perfect combination of unformed brains and abundant vitality.

Yet it takes grown-ups to harness vitality and steer it towards the desired ends – and rather few grown-ups at that, provided they are trained in the dark arts of venomous propaganda.

Such chaps are seldom in short supply. That’s why youngsters swelled the ranks of Bolsheviks and Nazis, the Red Guards and Khmer Rouge, the CND and Greenpeace – and now of the Extinction Rebellion.

Greta Thunberg is typical in this sense, if rather tending towards the more precocious end of the range.

According to her, she first became concerned about warm weather when she was nine years old, which points at an unfortunate oversight on her parent’s part. Greta’s father ought to have noticed that his little girl was going off the rails, thrown her over his knee and given her a good spanking.

Then again, such a time-honoured treatment might not have worked because little Greta is clearly deranged. She admits openly that she has been “diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, OCD and selective mutism,” which should have put her into psychiatric care long ago.

“I see the world a bit differently, from another perspective…,” she adds. “I can do the same thing for hours.” Yes, quite. Loony bins are full of patients making similar claims.

By the time she reached the ripe old age of 15 the poor girl began to skip school every Friday, camping outside Sweden’s parliament with a hand-written sign saying “School Strike for Climate”.

The idea of ideologised truancy appealed to millions of youngsters worldwide, who avidly followed suit.

I’m not surprised about Greta’s popularity among young idiots worldwide. Madness attracts, and absolute madness attracts absolutely. Deranged fanatics must emit a contagious miasma that has a hypnotic effect on susceptible masses.

Just watch videos of Hitler’s speeches, and you’ll know what I mean. A modern Western man in the throes of shamanistic ecstasy should have immediately attracted men in white coats. Instead Hitler attracted millions of hypnotised dummies bellowing their Heils!!! in unison.

Greta is typologically similar. She too talks in frankly apocalyptic terms: “We probably don’t even have a future any more. That future has been sold so that a small number of people can make unimaginable amounts of money.”

Notice the appeal to envy. It’s osmotic rather than rational because even a youngster, assuming some degree of mental competence, would know that it’s modern science and technology that keep an extremely large number of people in clean water, food, decent quarters and medical treatment.

The same large numbers who before the Industrial Revolution would have died now not only live but have enough leisure time on their hands to listen to crazed prepubescent creatures.

Unsatisfied by the havoc caused in London by the Extinction Rebels she inspired, Greta is now calling for a general climate strike in Britain. It’s not enough that London traffic is at a standstill, now they want to paralyse the whole country in the name of Greta’s lunacy.

And people – MPs! – listen. Not just Gove, but also Berkow, Corbyn, Cable and countless others are falling over themselves to meet Greta, genuflect and kiss her ring.

Having detected a mind and temperament similar to his own, Jeremy Corbyn provided a perfect accompaniment to Greta’s rants: “Young people will be the most affected by climate change – seeing them take charge of their future is inspiring. Labour’s committed to working with young people campaigning to save our planet.”

I bet it is, just like Trotsky and Pol Pot. But I wonder – as Corbyn never does – what he means. For young people to be ‘the most affected by climate change’, the end has to be nigh fairly soon, say in a few decades, which isn’t a claim even most activists make. Jeremy should have said ‘those yet unborn’, which would have been more sound if just as stupid.

My guess is that most Greta admirers among our politicos don’t give a damn about either her or her crusade. What they do care about is staying on the right side of orthodoxy.

One distinguishing feature of modernity is its capacity for effecting overnight metamorphoses. Yesterday’s perversions become today’s norm; yesterday’s villainy, today’s morality; yesterday’s lunacy, today’s orthodoxy.

And each orthodoxy has its figureheads who must be lauded as a signal of virtue. Greta is one such – and she has already been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s official: the world is mad.