Who's seen that bloody annoying government climate change - sorry, climate challenge, hurrr - ad? Someone bought me a set-top box, and I can pick up some of the channels, and even keep them for a few minutes before the remote control deletes them by mistake, and I found where they've been hiding all the good programmes from me - which are mostly old programmes as it turns out, and incidentally don't you dare take the piss out of 1973 because I would go back in a bloody second. (Yes, yes, tank-tops, ha ha ha, Austin Allegros, ha ha ha, but they had innocence and simplicity and hope and reasons for being alive which we lack entirely, and besides I was three and not quite weaned yet.) So I've been watching TV a bit. (Oh and by the way, to digress for a minute, did anyone watch those Krzysztof Thingy films on BBC4? I saw some of the first two. Jesus. Cheery buggers, the Poles. 'Yes, son, the ice is thick enough to skate on.' Uh oh. I suspect nothing good can come of this. I think I will turn to Men and Motors. Too late. Ker-splosh. And then the next one: 'Hello, neighbour, do you remember me?' 'Yes, you ran over my dog two years ago.' Sigh. He probably won't lend her sugar now. 'I have come to ask you to tell me if my husband is dying of a hideous disease and if I can visit him in hospital.' 'Shalln't and can't.' Sigh.)

Anyway late the other night, I think after the compilation of bits from talk shows from 1973, when people wore wing collars, ha ha ha, but could, you know, talk, I was goaded into hyena-like laughter and - oh no but wait, first of all, the first thing that pissed me off - that bloody ad for the BBC on the BBC where it's going on about a news team who had to take their cameras apart so they could get them over a fucking mountain in Afghanistan in time to make the scheduled broadcast, and then it goes, 'The BBC. This is what we do.' I mean, what the hell? Yes, very cool, very dedicated - but much cooler not to mention it, surely? Not very gentlemanly, not very manly, to indulge in - I really can't work out whether it's whining or boasting or a bit of both. 'This is what we do.' What do you want, sympathy? Love? Understanding? The feckless adulation of small boys? A pat on the back? If you have a grievance, state it clearly. If you would like to be excused covering wars that don't take place in completely flat countries with proper TV studios, say so. If you're trying to convince your wives that war correspondence isn't all duty-free booze and posing in flak-jackets, take it up with them, not me. Don't pull some half-arsed martyr routine like a fucking garrulous charwoman. 'Ooh, I've been on me knees all day, and then I had to pull these big cupboards out, and me with me hip, but don't mind me, no-one else does.' Ed Murrow didn't go, 'This is London, the bombs are falling, the lights are going out, ooh, the blackout, my taxi nearly crashed twice getting here, and then there was a traffic jam and I had to walk the last few hundred yards to the studio, and the lift was out of order so you know what, I had to take the stairs, but this is what I do.' That bloke who took the photo of the napalmed Vietnamese girl never went, 'The interesting thing about this shot, as I was taking the film to be developed the road was blocked by a water buffalo, so I had to drive around it, so I did drive around it, because that's what I do.' You know? I mean I've just spilled tea on my mousepad, so I went and got a towel and mopped it up, because this is what I do, but I don't expect a fucking medal. This is deeply symptomatic of something or other, even if it's just the modern tendency to waste money on things that are utterly pointless and highly sodding annoying and repeated every bastard hour on the hour.

But the thing that really got my goat and made me laugh and swear very loud indeed was the government advert for climate change - except it's not, you see, it's climate challenge, that was the slogan and the name of the website they've set up. And it's all 'The climate is changing, this could affect our way of life' and dramatic shots of waves smashing on rocks, and images of the invisible gasses coming out of cars and factories and houses and planes, and then, 'There are things we can do' - and - hurrah! Wind-farms! And then they repeated the website again, climatechallenge-dot-gov or whatever, and I threw things.

I'm trying to remain as coherent as possible and rein in my snarls, because I begin to suspect I'm a demographic of one, because otherwise a lot of things and people would have been set on fire by now. I think the point I want to make is as follows:

A world that persistently and willfully uses the word 'challenge' is not worth saving. The biggest 'challenge' of the 21st Century is the compulsory sterilisation of those who use the word 'challenge'. If you expect to be taken seriously, do not say 'challenge' when you mean 'problem' or 'threat' or 'disaster' or 'potential cataclysm' or 'I want my mother.' Learning a foreign language is a challenge; trying to keep an entire packet of Maltesers in your mouth until they melt is a challenge; the possible end of life as we know it requires a different term.

No, that isn't what I meant, at all. What I mean to say is:

I really, really want the world to end after seeing that ad. I can't even be fucked waiting for global warming; I intend to french-kiss the first sneezing chicken I can find. I mean, yeah, how are they going to deal with that little challenge if that happens, the coming Black Death Part Two? Set up a website called GlobalblackdeathkillerplaguepeopledyinginthestreetsthelivingshallenvythedeadCHALLENGE.com. Give stern yet positive speeches along the lines of 'Clearing up 20 million putrefying corpses and re-establishing some rudiments of civilization among the emaciated survivors will be one of the most interesting challenges of this exciting new stone age.' And most importantly, I imagine, they'll be preparing to meet the challenge right now by paying their friends tens of millions of pounds to act as middlemen in procuring vaccines, which probably won't work.

Which brings me to my other big problem with the ad: the windfarms. The government was given £250,000 by a manufacturer of wind-turbines (see here or here). Therefore, you crooks, you thieves, you whores, you dishonourable and despicable men, do not talk to us about wind-farms ever, as you no longer have the right. Especially as wind-farms are ugly, noisy, bugger up the environment and provide shit-all power. But even if they were a workable answer, which they aren't, you do not have the right to implement them now you have taken money from them. You understand, you fucking thieves? Do not put out adverts for your business partners' products with taxpayers' money; do not litter the country with these useless products bought with taxpayers' money. If you must put them somewhere, please let it be on top of your own houses, or outside your holiday homes in Tuscany, or up your horrible bought whore thieving thief arses.

Further annoyance came when I visited the climatechallenge website. It is upbeat and full of pictures of cute babies and people looking happy and it is horrible. It was written by the sort of people who use the word 'challenge' and it says challenge a lot and words like 'communicating' and 'initiative' and 'issues' and 'attitudes' and 'make a difference' and 'together' and 'orgasm' and I really don't have the sort of brain that can read things like that, apart from 'orgasm', which probably wasn't really there. But actual information about climate change was in short supply and hard to find. In fact, the main gist of the site is that they have six million quid to give away for ideas to promote, sorry, communicate, awareness of climate change and if you want some apply to them. So, what I watched was an ad promoting a website promoting the making of ads about climate change.

(Sorry, though, the deadline for applicants for the cash has passed for this year. I'd be interested to see a list of those who get grants to try and cross-reference it to people connected to the Labour Party.)

There were some flash animations but they didn't work with my browser so I suppose I'll just have to drown when the icecaps melt but I bet they're really good. There's a pdf that gives you some ideas on how to Communicate the climate Challenge but I could only get it to half work: the bits I saw included a poster of people of all races and walks of life all smiling happily at the challenge of the world ending. I expected the usual stuff about how you personally can help fight climate change - insulate the loft, ask everyone if they want tea while you're boiling the kettle, close the door, were you born in a field? - the sort of thing about which Jeremy Hardy used to say 'Fair enough, but I'm not the Runcorn Chemical Company, you know' - but apart from a line which says that 'even switching on a light' is contributing to the problem there isn't even any of that apart from an external link to a completely different site.

Communicating awareness of deckchairs on the Titanic; focus groups on the Hindenburg; the four Big Challenges of the Apocalypse. Let's face it, we're going down.

However, let me admit... I was sort of relieved when I saw the website was a poncey and useless slush-fund for well-connected creatives. Because for a moment I thought they were about to start to take it seriously; and indeed maybe wank like this is the first step. And when that happens, it will be ugly and unfair, like the London congestion charge on a huge scale, the poor prohibited, the rich privileged. It won't be like the Second World War where everyone shared privations. The elite will still get theirs.

If this is for real, if there's an imminent danger, if it's absolutely certain that man-made emissions could make the difference between disaster and survival - I say if because I don't have the energy to keep up with the claims and counter-claims, and who can you trust? and whenever someone tries to Communicate Awareness of this Challenge to me, I tend to go La la la not listening, but it seems to be generally accepted to be the case [EDIT: oh but see postscript at bottom] - and assuming we don't just walk into disaster from sheer inertia or because we're too busy making happy little websites describing the 'challenge' - the best hope, I suppose, is some new cleaner technology coming along and saving us. Wind power, no. Nuclear power, NO. I really think I'd rather we took the risk of all going out together than that some people somewhere have another Chernobyl so the rest of us can go on plugging in our chargers. De-industrialize? Tear ourselves from the electric tit? Return to a simple agrarian mode of life? Much as I enjoy picturing myself as the stern but benevolent patriarch of a happy little farming community with six comely Amish wenches under me, it seems unlikely.

So if workable new cleaner energy sources don't appear in time... if it got to a situation where it was clear that increased energy efficiency alone wouldn't make it and there had to be some sort of savage cutting and rationing of emissions... leaving aside the question of how it could be divided up and imposed worldwide... how would it be arranged within nations?

Dreadfully, in ours. If it ever got to a point where cars were rationed, they wouldn't go to people who love cars, like Jeremy Clarkson or those little sods who tear round in souped-up Saxos, or people who need them, like mothers of young families or small traders who needed vans or whatever - they'd go to chauffeur-driven whore-thieves in the government and their pimps, patrons and parasites.

If they ever start heavily taxing or restricting air travel, they'll start with holidays, the one valid reason for getting on a plane, and give exemptions for business trips, things which could be accomplished by phone or e-mail. And political 'summits' and fact-finding tours in Barbados or wherever will remain untouched until the North Pole is the size of a slush-puppy.

And if it reached a point where eleccy consumption had to be scaled down, the people who write 'challenge' would get all they want so they could put together happy little pamphlets telling the rest of us about the fun and excitement of roasting a chicken over a candle.

And when it gets to the opportunities for corruption involved in deciding who gets to have a factory or not... I don't want to know. But I do know this government couldn't be allowed that kind of power. If we really think that some sort of emergency situation is possible sooner or later where tough decisions will be required, let us for Christ's sake start now to provide ourselves with upright leaders and begin immediately to hound from public life anyone who isn't clean, incorruptible and fair-minded.

But we won't. I fear if there is an apocalypse, the people who write 'challenge' will be in the bunkers and will be all that remains of us. And it's only a shame I won't be able to see them facing the challenge of having to eat their own legs, except they would come up with euphemisms for that and it would be called intra-system protein recycling or something.

This is idle. I should have ended it after 'we're going down.' To sum up, the government are shit, I'm not watching telly again, and I will be happy to die of chicken flu.

9th Apr 06

PS:
And on the other hand...
PPS:
Environment Minister has links to the nuclear industry

PPPS:
Anyone who digs windfarms doesn't love nature. If you loved a bird you wouldn't put a rotating propeller on her head.

(Well, I would, if I was playing the Spitfire game, but you probably wouldn't.)

PPPPS:
Read Gore Vidal's essays 'Gods and Greens' and 'Cue the Green God, Ted', available in 'United States', which you should get from the library now if you haven't read it for the sheer wit alone.

PPPPPS, Feb 07:

In the wake of the release of the latest assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which apparently concludes that human activities are 'very likely' responsible for global warming, I'm now fairly sure that the whole thing's a crock. Probably. I hope. At the very least, when the British Environment Secretary says 'debate over the science of climate change is well and truly over' it is clearly a duty to blow raspberries and start debating like hell.

The very unaninimity of the assessment makes me suspicious. Where's the dissenting view? Where's the minority report? When was the last time 2500 scientists agreed on anything? Outside Soviet Russia, when was the last time 2500 anythings agreed on anything? The evidence really has not reached a point where it can be accepted like the law of gravity or something.

I strongly suspect that reports like this are the sexed-up '45 minutes to launch Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction' dossier on a larger scale. Not necessarily completely false, but so alarmist and selectively presented as to be misleading. In fact, I'm starting to think there's a chance the whole Manmade Global Warning theory is a case of mass hysteria on a par with witch-burning, on which with the benefit of hindsight and greater knowledge future generations will look back with a merry chuckle.

Unfortunately some - although by no means all - of the most prominent skeptics have taken oil money, so I suppose one should treat their testimony cautiously. On the other hand, it's not like they can take their dirty cash and fly off to a different planet if this one goes up in smoke, and it can be argued that proponents of the theory of manmade global warming have a personal stake in the debate too, in the shape of a continued flow of funding from various quarters.

And after reading around for a bit, I have to say it seems to me that on the whole the skeptics show a greater humility, open-mindedness and sense of caution about their theories than the proponents of manmade global warming. Which I thought was the essence of science. Well, personally I think the essence of science is some arrogant white-haired old loon cackling insanely as he reanimates a corpse or makes a human ear grow on a mouse's arse. But I thought they at least had the self-image of being patient and humble interrogators of nature.

Furthermore a tendency towards the loathsome arts of spin and linguistic massage is ringing alarm bells for me. Why is the talk always of 'carbon emissions' instead of carbon dioxide - is it because we the thick public will get confused because, you know, that's the stuff we all breathe out and that plants eat? Why does a leading proponent of manmade global warming insist it would be 'misleading' to call water vapour a greenhouse gas, when it is, and the biggest one, just because it isn't manmade? Why all of a sudden are the references to 'climate change' rather than global warming? Because if I stepped outside right now my bloody nipples would fall off and shatter and I'd be struck by the inkling it may not be getting warmer at all?

Then there's the phenomenon of the campaigner who will conscientiously recycle and dim all his lights down and whatever, and then hop on a jet to fly halfway round the world to attend a conference on global warming. All too easy to mock, perhaps, and in fact I don't want to mock people who clearly care about things more than I do. But... is that kind of thing perhaps not just hypocrisy, or unavoidable compromise, but possibly evidence of doublethink, a hint that at some deep level they don't really believe in manmade global warming either? Although as I say, I am very much not looking forward to the day when everyone is forced to behave as though they believed it whether they do or not.

Whatever. I remain agnostic and in fact deeply uninterested. I don't really give a damn if the world ends anyway, and as I never have sex and sperm banks keep blacklisting me the future generations shit carries no weight with me either.

A beginner's guide to why the whole thing may be a great big crock

An interesting, but somewhat more technically involved, discussion thread on the site of someone whom I gather is not so much a skeptic as wary of the shonky science that's passing for proof

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