the brilliantly leaping gazelle

I caught the weather report at the end of the BBC News yesterday, and it cheered me right up. I’m not joking. It really did. I was smiling my best Cheshire Cat smile, proper ear to ear action. So much so, that by the end of it, my face was aching. The reasons for my reaction can best be summed as amusement at humans capacity for self-delusion. Because with every weather warning, with every school closure because of the hot weather and with every death that occurs because of it, the more it is revealed to be the nonsense it is.

The weather report started off with the UK. Hottest day since records began, all sorts of records being broken, still more to be broken, weather warnings, hosepipe bans….blah blah blah. Then the map zoomed out to reveal what is happening in Europe. The same there too. Some parts better than others, but its only a matter of degree. The cheery takeaway I got was that whatever we do in the UK, no matter how important we think what we do is and no matter how urgent the need for action is, it won’t make a flying fuck of difference. We can all believe all manner things to be true, but believing in something, no matter how hard you want it to be true, doesn’t make it so. What the UK does only matters if the rest of the world does it too and as the weather map detailing the extreme heat engulfing the rest of Europe proved, the rest of the world clearly isn’t.

Conversely, the first part of the global warming self delusion was predicated upon discrediting research which proved it existed. That the research that discovered it in the first place, proved it was real was commissioned by the very same people who then spent years challenging its veracity. This is not some a fever-dream bought on by the heat either. ‘Big Oil’ knew. The dates may be disputed, the earliest I’ve found goes back to 1959, most go with the mid ’60’s, the more charitable plump for the late ’70’s but at any rate, it was long before any United Nations sponsored snout jamboree.

I refuse to call it climate change. Global warming had a honesty to it. It was all right there in the name. It was’t difficult to understand. Things are getting warmer and the whole world is affected. Action was needed. Unfortunately, that action was a name change. Climate change makes me think of a wealthy Victorian consumptive who retreats to the Swiss Alps for a year on the orders of her doctor. It reminds me of the mayor in ‘Jaws’. Mindful of the need to protect the towns tourist revenues, he wants the first victims death certificate changed because, as he puts it, ‘When you say barracuda, people say ‘what’, but when you say shark, you’ve got a panic on your hands’

So of course people continued having children because thats what people do and thats what capitalism needs. It doesn’t matter if one consumes less of this thing, more of that thing and starts consuming a new thing, its still consuming. Whatever it is that being consumed, no matter how ethically sourced its components are, no matter how well the workers that turn those components into the finished product are treated, that finished product will still have to be manufactured, packaged, and transported before its sold. And it follows that the more people there are to buy things, the more things will be bought.

The continued growth in the global population is yet another example of self-delusion. I can understand my parents thinking when they had me. To them, my life would be better than theirs. That was always the thinking of all parents, ever. since always. But now? Who could look at the state of the world now, full of myriad uncertainties and unforeseeable problems, full of dangers known and unknown and think, full of disease, scarcity and the wars they cause, and think ‘Yeah, I’ll bring a child into all of this, they’re bound thank me for that!’