Yet to arrive in Ed's world

Climate researcher Judith Curry says the era of ‘climate stupidity’ is done and declares victory

As media outlets shut down their climate desks, corporations retreat from climate targets, and polls of voters show they rate climate change lowest on their priorities, critics of the “climate crisis” narrative are saying it may be time to move on.

American climatologist Dr. Judith Curry on Tuesday announced that she would no longer maintain her influential blog, “Climate Etc.”

“It’s time to declare victory against climate stupidity and move on,” said in her final post. The reelection of President Donald Trump came with an overall shift in the political landscape regarding climate and energy issues. Since then, major media outlets shut down their climate desks, corporations are easing back on emission-reduction targets, and polls consistently show the public rates climate change low on their list of priorities.

Some figures like Curry who disputed the “climate crisis” narrative — often in the face of vitriol from those who support it — are now saying their efforts paid off and an era of climate hysteria is coming to an end.


Andrew Burnham doesn't come across as the kind of chancer who would notice the failure of Net Zero, shift his position and shift Ed Miliband at the same time, but who knows?

Ed Miliband's climate fanaticism may be crazy and his craziness may have to end eventually, but politically it has served him well. 

Of course he is just a little crazy, poor sweet, but it is a very profitable kind of craziness, so one need not drench oneself in tears about it. One of the secrets of a successful life is to know how to be a little profitably crazy.’

Josephine Tey - To Love and Be Wise (1950)

Perambulating spheres of atmosphere

Bella Ramsey and Ben Whishaw sign up to Green Rider sustainability pledge

Actors including Bella Ramsey, Stephen Fry and Ben Whishaw have signed up to a pledge to cut the environmental impact of making films and TV shows.

UK arts union Equity has drawn up a "Green Rider" with eco-friendly clauses that can be added to contracts.

They range from avoiding private jets and big trailers to bringing their own water bottles and coffee cups on set.


She wondered if all actors were like that. Perambulating spheres of atmosphere with a little actor safely cocooned at the heart of each. How nice it must be, so cushioned and safe from harsh reality. They weren’t really born at all; they were still floating in some pre-natal fluid.

Josephine Tey - Miss Pym Disposes (1946)

A stupid convention

During a recent thunderstorm I had a momentary sense of how fine it would be to watch the storm from a remote moorland cottage. It was an imaginary sense of being closer to a natural world which has not been sanitised by modernity. A sense of being apart from the pressures and intrusions of modernity.

Following a similar theme, the passage below is taken from one of a series of detective novels by Josephine Tey. Her Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Alan Grant, has a period of debilitating mental fatigue due to overwork so takes himself off for a holiday in the Outer Hebrides. Here he begins to recover his equilibrium on a wild and lonely beach where he escapes the pressures and intrusions of London life.

 

He walked down over the fine white sand to the edge of the water, and let the tumult roar over him. At close quarters it had a senseless quality that dissolved his uncomfortable sense of diminution and made him feel human and superior. He turned his back on it almost contemptuously as one would on a bad-mannered child who was making an exhibition of himself. He felt warm and alive and master of himself; admirably intelligent and gratifyingly sentient. He walked back up the sand, absurdly, and extravagantly glad to be a human being and alive. The air that came off the land when he had turned his back on the salt sterile wind from the sea was gentle and warm. It was like opening the door of a house. He went on across the grassy levels without once looking back. The wind hounded him along the flat bogs, but it was no longer in his face and the salt was no longer in his nostrils. His nostrils were full of the good smell of damp earth; the smell of growing things. He was happy.

Josephine Tey – The Singing Sands (1952)

George Santayana had something to say along similar lines - our spiritual need to be among natural causes and to experience them as natural. It’s where so many modern environmental causes fall flat as they seek to wrap the natural world in fluffy political virtues. 

 

A stupid convention still looks on material and mathematical processes as somehow distressing and ugly, and systems of philosophy, artificially mechanical, are invented to try to explain natural mechanism away; whereas in no region can the spirit feel so much at home as among natural causes, or realise so well its universal affinities, or so safely enlarge its happiness. Mechanism is the source of beauty. It is not necessary to look so high as the stars to perceive this truth: the action of an animal’s limbs or the movement of a waterfall will prove it to any one who has eyes and can shake himself loose from verbal prejudices, those debris of old perceptions which choke all fresh perception in the soul. Irrational hopes, irrational shames, irrational decencies, make man’s chief desolation. A slight knocking of fools’ heads together might be enough to break up the ossifications there and start the blood coursing again through possible channels. Art has an infinite range; nothing shifts so easily as taste and yet nothing so persistently avoids the directions in which it might find most satisfaction.

George Santayana - The Life of Reason (1905)

Today the the natural world is still partly obscured by yet more stupid conventions. Irrational hopes, irrational shames, irrational decencies, make man’s chief desolation. Indeed they do.

Sir Whatsit needs to become more interesting

 

Darling, you know quite well that no one is interesting unless they're where they shouldn't be. The Prime Minister at Number Ten is simply dull, but the Prime Minister up someone else's apple tree would be screamingly interesting.

Josephine Tey - The Expensive Halo (1929)

Ready to run

 

Nor did he look like a bookmaker's clerk. He was more like a tout. There was about him that subtle suggestion of having no legal standing in the universe, of being perpetually ready to run.

Josephine Tey – Kif (1929)