Is Gaia a denier?

From our environment correspondent.

I recently held a very interesting interview with Professor Felix Knutta from the European Institute for Climate Protection. Professor Knutta thinks we should give serious consideration to the paranormal to explain the current hiatus in global warming. Paranormal techniques are the latest addition to the armoury of climate scientists, helping them resolve some tricky climate issues.

Professor Knutta and his team at the Institute have just received a substantial EU grant to follow up a number of intriguing lines of paranormal climate research.

“Firstly,” Professor Knutta told me as we sat drinking excellent Java coffee in his Paris office, “there are reasons to believe that millions of climate deniers funded by the Koch brother are deliberately leaving their fridge doors open to prevent global temperatures from rising."

“Clearly climate models cannot be wrong” Professor Knutta added, “so although leaving your fridge door open cannot have a long-term impact on climate change, it could be used by deniers to upset the official balance of nature.”

“Surely Professor, this isn’t so much paranormal activity as climate sabotage,” I suggested.

“Of course it’s bloody sabotage - that much is obvious,” the Professor snapped in that abrupt manner of his, “but how do you think we found out about it in the first place?”

“Surveillance?” I hazarded.

“Well... I can’t say exactly,” muttered Professor Knutta, almost as if he suddenly realised he may be giving away sensitive information. “The technique is very new,” he added eventually, “but suffice it to say that we are detecting a massive amount of fridge door sabotage by mind melding.”

“Mind melding?”

“Yes. At great risk to our researchers, we successfully melded with denier minds and bingo! We uncovered the sabotage.”

“Very impressive Professor. Somewhat like Mr Spock –“

“Secondly, there is the issue of methane gas, a much stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Human flatulence contains methane and we believe that the global legumes market has been manipulated by the Koch brother to raise prices worldwide and reduce consumption. Beans are a major source of human flatulence and deniers are manipulating the market to reduce methane emissions.”

“So deniers are making a concerted global attack on human flatulence?”

“Indeed they are,” the Professor insisted. “Do you fart less than you did a few years ago? I don’t on principle, but less human methane means less global warming, thus giving us a false picture of the temperature rise mandated by climate models.”

Thirdly, and most controversially, Professor Knutta believes he has evidence that Gaia herself is a climate denier, hiding massive amounts of heat somewhere as yet unknown.

“How was this done?” I asked the Professor.

“Easy, Gaia has been bribed by the Koch brothers to tuck away all the missing heat in some secret location. We aren’t sure where yet, but paranormal techniques have helped us to locate a number of possible hiding places.”

“But how has Gaia been bribed?”

“By promising to plant more trees,” the Professor explained with a gesture of irritation. “A simple idea, but utterly evil because Gaia loves trees.”

“So all the tree-planting is being done –“

“By deniers,” the Professor insisted loudly.

“And the solution?” I asked with a certain amount of trepidation.

“Chop them all down,” shouted the Professor with a strange, high-pitched laugh. “Show that Gaia bitch we mean business.”