Trump likes it hot

The style is indeed the man (Le style, c’est l’homme même, as Buffon put it).

That’s why I’d impeach Trump simply because he tops a business suit with a baseball cap. A man who commits such sartorial solecisms either is a vulgar lout or, which is worse, pretends to be one for populist reasons.

Also, if the on-going investigation implicates Trump in illegal dealings with Putin’s kleptofascist regime, he ought to be not just impeached but imprisoned, with the key thrown away.

Meanwhile, Trump is trying all sorts of things on for size, some good, some bad. Some he gets away with, some are blocked in Congress and some others put him in the way of slings and arrows.

Amazingly, he’s drawing the densest barrage for one unequivocally good thing he has done: getting out of the obscene Paris Agreement.

The reason Trump cited involved American jobs: compliance with the Paris guidelines would shift them to countries that routinely flout international laws and regulations, especially China and India.

Perhaps a politician seeking popularity has to come up with this argument. But a truth seeker would simply explain that the whole global warming hysteria is a hoax, and a pernicious one at that.

It’s a hoax because the anthropogenic contribution to global warming is so small as to be trivial. It’s a pernicious hoax because its genesis isn’t in science but in ideology.

Solar activity is by far the greatest contributor to climate change: the more active the sun, the higher the temperature. And solar activity is cyclical, swinging within both a vast 1,500-year amplitude and a small 30-year one.

This explains why, since people began to juxtapose temperature and the sun some 400 years ago, 30-year-long thermal cycles on earth have consistently coincided with the 30-year-long solar cycles. Hence in the twentieth century temperature grew from 1900 to 1940, then dropped from 1940 to 1970, then began to go up again.

The bigger cycles follow the same pattern. The earth swings between periods of extreme cold, such as the Ice Age, and comfortable warmth, such as now.

Hippos, who hate cold, could be found in the Thames 150,000 years ago. When the Romans came to England, grapes grew in the North Country and in Scotland, suggesting a warmer climate than now – and Romans didn’t use aerosols. A thousand years ago world temperature was warmer than today, yet no fracking was under way. And 800 years ago, reindeer, who perversely like cold weather, roamed the woods of England – there must have been quite a chill in the air.

Nobody’s denying that we’re going through one of the warmer periods, even though the increase in temperature is nowhere near as steep or calamitous as Trump’s critics claim – nor as universal.

Global warmers are claiming that scientists agree with their doomsday predictions. Some do, but it’s a lie to say that a consensus exists. Many noted scientists specialising in disciplines tangentially touching upon anthropogenic global warming, such as physics, chemistry, astronomy, astrophysics, palaeontology, geology and so forth, blow this theory out of the water.

That isn’t surprising. After all, the anthropogenic origin of warm weather is the first discovery in the history of science made not by scientists but by a political body, the UN. Much as one admires the epic successes this organisation has enjoyed in its own field (Yugoslavia springs to mind, among many other calamities), one has to say that the evidential base of its theory is, to be charitable, weak.

The political base, however, is massive, and the banners of global warming have drawn all the same people who oppose nuclear energy, shale gas, medical experiments on animals, free enterprise and everything else that can improve and prolong human lives.

They use the word ‘capitalism’ as their bogeyman, but in fact they’re driven by visceral hatred of our civilisation. In the past, those dreadful capitalists exploited the proletariat; now they’re destroying ‘our planet’ (I’d make the admittedly radical suggestion that you should punch in the nose anyone who thus refers to the earth.)

Those same people, or their typological progenitors, used to prefer the virtues of Stalinism to the vices of capitalism. When the global warming myth runs its course – and they’ve already had to replace that defunct term with ‘climate change’ – they’ll march against something else.

They’re scaring us with a high content of CO2 in the atmosphere, and it’s indeed high. However, it was 12 times as high during the Cambrian period, yet somehow mankind managed to muddle through.

And what’s wrong with a higher level of CO2 anyway? Rather than harming people, it benefits them in any number of ways. Above all, it improves global food security, which is critical considering the rising population. Not only does CO2 make food more plentiful, but it also makes it better, for example by increasing the amount of Vitamin C in citrus fruit.

The ‘greenhouse effect’ does exist, but it’s trivial compared with the effect of solar activity. And in any case, plants, animals, volcanoes etc. will continue to produce CO2 in greater amounts than man does – and thank God for that.

But even assuming that the ideological scaremongering about warm weather has some merit (and this is an assumption no sensible person would make), the Paris Agreement is a grossly inadequate and implicitly subversive measure.

According to the iffy data touted by its initiators, global temperature is going to increase by 2-5 per cent over the next few decades. Yet even the stated goal of the Agreement is only to shave some 0.2 per cent off that.

However, the hysterical pitch of the clamour surrounding Trump’s correct decision suggests that the stated objective isn’t the real one. That’s always the case with massive crusades driven by ideology.

Lenin, Stalin and Mao supposedly sought the good of the people, whereas in fact they craved their blood anointing the power of an evil elite. The UN supposedly prevents wars, whereas in fact it reflects the perennial socialist dream of world government. The EU pretends to pursue Europe’s economic interests, whereas in fact its objectives are the same as the UN’s, if on a smaller scale.

By tossing away the dreadful Paris Agreement, Trump called its fans’ bluff. He’s being attacked not because their case has merit, but specifically because it doesn’t. No one is hated more than an apostate, and the president went against a tenet of the wicked global creed.

Why, for that one can almost forgive him that slumming baseball cap.