Restless bears

The weather is fucked up – officially. This December in Sweden has been like a strange dream, pulling open the curtains a week before Christmas to a scene of blinding sunshine, singing birds and temperatures of 7 or 8 degrees.

Winter in this country is supposed to be COLD, dammit! Around now the average temperature SHOULD be hovering just a bit under zero, but for all of December it has been between 6 and 10, sometimes as high as 13. Mushrooms are blooming, bears are forgetting to hibernate, and spring flowers are popping up. This is all seriously fucking strange, and points to vast and serious things afoot.

And still the queues of cars continue into downtown Stockholm to prolong their orgy of frantic consumption, stuffing their cars with a cubic metre of useless crap for people they barely like. All these brave and hardy souls, beating the planetary balance over the head with a shitty stick in order to generate some “joy” from wrapping paper, sausages and sticky liqueur.

I have no time any more for climate-change “sceptics”. And, as Geroge Monbiot points out in his seminal book “Heat”, these people are not sceptics in the usually sense of the word. A sceptic does not form a conclusion first and then work backwards to find evidence to back it up. These people do. They are plank-headed morons and should be treated as such: “Oh, the whole scientific establishment is pulling a big scam on us, climate change is not real.” And why, may I ask, would tens of thousands of bright, young people, with their whole academic futures before them, be pulling such a “scam”? What possible fucking good will it do them? If they are interested in scams, then they are free to go work at Shell, or Phillip Morris, or as a government advisor.

Note to plank-headed moron: carbon dioxide causes warming; man produces huge excess of carbon dioxide; therefore man produces warming. It’s so simple even a libertarian could work it out. People blather on about how the seas will absorb this extra gas, or how the plants will grow faster, despite any evidence to back this up which hasn’t been funded by Exxon. And lacking their own evidence, they attempt to discredit other peoples as some kind of “proof”. Yeah, proof of them being retarded.

Until last month I was on a science fiction mailing list until a climate-change “sceptic” caused me to leave it. This boulder-headed individual, having learned his climate science from the Internet, was very fond of throwing “evidence” at anybody who dared to raise their head, and “won” every argument by keeping the discussion going long after anybody else could be bothered. Blah blah blah, for hundreds and hundreds of words, until everybody else dropped the discussion and went back to their lives.

Now I like to give people a chance, but any fuckwit who can look around in this 10-degree December and not notice that something is fucked up with the world, is just not worth any more of my air, and is clearly beyond help. I wish him a happy Christmas anyway, the sour old bastard, and hope he lives long enough to be proved wrong.

/ paddy