The word ‘saviour’ shouldn’t be bandied about lightly at any time, especially during Advent. From late November to late December, even non-believers are well-advised to reserve that title for you know whom.
However, King Charles III isn’t out to save our souls for life everlasting, not yet at any rate. The task he has set himself is less grandiose, although still lofty. He wants to save our planet, which word combination has the same effect on me as the word ‘culture’ allegedly (apocryphally?) had on a certain German politician of the past.
As an intermediate task, His Majesty threw the weight of his stature behind scientists preaching the impending catastrophe of a world soon to be cooked well-done. “It seems very peculiar to me,” complained the king, “that in other areas everybody takes what the scientists are saying as absolute vital truth, but in this case for some reason or other it is not so apparently simple.”
Fancy that. However, before my heart bleeds out for those present-day Cassandras, let’s just say that far from “everybody takes what the scientists are saying as absolute vital truth”. Those who do must have played truant in school when history was taught.
Ever since Aristotle laid down the absolute vital truth that the heart, not the brain, is the centre of neurological activity, wise people have taken scientific pronouncements with a grain of salt, possibly also with a wedge of lime and a shot of tequila.
Euclid’s geometry, Ptolemy’s astronomy, Newton’s physics, transmutation of species, telegony and so forth were all taken as absolute vital truth and then superseded. Why, when studying physics at a Soviet school back in the 1950s, I was taught that “the atom is the smallest and further indivisible particle of matter.”
Granted, outside Soviet schools, that hadn’t been absolute vital truth for some 40 years – but it had been once. The Supreme Governor of our state church should really believe in only one absolute vital truth, one whose Advent his church is celebrating this month. And he should know that all scientific truths are relative – something to hold the fort until a superior truth arrives.
Every time the subject comes up, I recommend the book Heaven and Earth by Ian Plimer. This eminent climatologist tears the global warming alarmism to shreds, showing it’s nothing but unscientific rubbish, politically and ideologically motivated.
He cites reams of research, each point referenced to dozens of research papers, proving the cyclical nature of climate. The Earth (‘our planet’) has been warmer than it is now for some 85 per cent of its history: the Roman and Medieval Warming Periods, for example, featured much higher mean temperatures than today.
Plimer isn’t the only scientist who rejects what to His Majesty is the absolute vital truth. As far back as in 1997, over 30,000 scientists signed the so-called Oregon Petiton, arguing in simple words the same case Prof. Plimer later presented as meticulous research.
Although some of the signatories had dubious credentials, most were serious scholars. So let’s just say, generously, that the issue is still open to debate. But no debate is allowed of any theory that promises to degrade the West, in this case economically.
Plimer kindly attributes the whole global warming nonsense to faulty research methodology. While bowing to his expertise, I still think bad faith also had a role to play. Witness the ease with which climate activists float to other anti-Western causes, such as pro-Palestinian anti-Semitism (Greta Thunberg is a case in point). Give them a cause and they’ll find a mob.
Once the ‘smart’ (in fact, heavily politicised and lightly educated) set has declared anything as absolute vital truth, one disagrees at one’s peril. So the bandwagon of wokery rattles on, and jumping on it promises any number of rewards, both social and financial. Conversely, failure to do so may spell the end of one’s career, either in politics or in science.
As for King Charles, he is worried about his grandchildren, meaning, actuarily speaking, he believes that the global fry-up will arrive this century. If he doesn’t save our planet, he will leave them a “ghastly legacy of horror”.
I sometimes wonder about the constitutional remit of our monarchs. Their power has been attenuating steadily since the Glorious Revolution, and these days they are expected to steer clear of political topics. Hence His Majesty must see global warming not as a political topic but as a moral imperative.
Yet saving our planet is definitely not part of his monarchic job. Leave that sort of thing to Greta, I’d suggest; you know, that evil child Prince Charles (as he then was) feted at Davos in 2020.
Rather than having sleepless nights over warm weather, His Majesty should worry about his realm, his dynasty and his church, all of which are in dire straits. If instead he starts championing voguish and wokish issues, he runs the risk of making his position redundant. What do we need him for if we already have that swivel-eyed Ed Miliband?
British monarchy has a vital constitutional role to play, sitting as it does at the centre of the ganglion where all political synapses converge. Yet republican sentiments are rife at the grassroots, especially among the kind of cultural demi-monde that has elevated global warming to the status of absolute vital truth.
Monarchy does run against the grain of modern post-Enlightenment sensibilities if only because it’s an ancient, traditional institution. Our paedocratic world is fuelled by the infantile certainty that anything of value started in this generation, while everything old puts brakes on the inexorable march of progress.
Another few governments like the present one might well encourage the people to deliver a redundancy notice to the monarchy, as perhaps personified at the time by His Majesty’s grandchildren. Averting that civilisational catastrophe ought to occupy the king’s every waking – as opposed to woking – moment.
He ought to have no time left in his schedule to expand on modern rubbish, the kind that’s here today and gone tomorrow. Instead of worrying about things he can do nothing about, he should do all he can not to leave his grandchildren the true “ghastly legacy of horror”, a rudderless republican Britain cast adrift and heading for the rocks.
Spot on! Mr Boot. I could not agree more.
Sound sense from start to finish, today.
Mr Plimer’s book may be the best book ever written, but I don’t have to read it to know that the global warming hypothesis is untrue. All I have to do is compare the weather I experience with the weather the Meteorological Office reports.
Summer in the UK this year was perhaps a little warmer than average in the daytime, but decidedly cooler than average at night. But the Met Office claims that it was the warmest summer ever recorded. Their claim was obviously untrue, and any supposedly scientific hypothesis that requires such falsification of data in order to become plausible is evidently not merely untrue but also scandalously dishonest.
You don’t seem to get this. Those Met chaps may not be able to forecast tomorrow’s weather accurately, but they know exactly what’s going to happen in 100 years — and even more exactly in 500 years. In general, the further away from the present, the more precise they get. But you are right: one doesn’t have to read Plimer to know the whole thing is a fraud. But he fills in the details.
I have tried using facts from Plimer’s book to try to temper the climate zealotry of close relatives. The response is at best, “That’s interesting.” It is hard to undo years (decades) of propaganda.
I will admit to some uneasy hours in my youth, worrying about killer bees (coming north from South America) and fire ants (coming west from Alabama). It has been half a century and I am still waiting for the sting of my first encounter.