I've already done a post with the title of Clive James, author and journalist and former TV personality. Hence, the above title – although this is not the first time Jonathan Swift has cropped up in the pages of SIS in the past. At www.sepp.org … the Week that Was (August 5th 2017), always has some interesting information. Following a quote by Einstein we are told that following the peak of El Nino in early 2016 temperatures have dropped – but not as sharply as they did after the previous peak in 1998. The 1998 El Nino was followed by a La Nina cooling. Currently, there is no indication of a La Nina occurring. So, what will happen later this year – and early 2018? Will we have a mild or cold winter?
The El Nino spreads across 2015 and 2016 and into early 2017 and yet Phys Org mentions a paper that has just come out claiming this is proof of a human role in that warming. The people at SEPP are being honest – are the climate change profiteers doing the same?
Clive James has a spot in the newsletter. He says that back in 1971 the Sydney Morning Herald announced the Great Barrier Reef would be dead in six months. For over 45 years we have had constant announcements of its imminent demise. James goes on to discuss the failure of major media organisations to recognise the reputable scientists who use hard evidence to question such claims. He brings up the subject of 'rubber numbers' – I must remember that one. Jonathan Swift, in Gulliver's Travels, populated his flying island of Lapata with scientists busily using rubber numbers to predict dire events. He called these scientists 'projectors' – and at the base of all projections of the projectors was the prediction that the earth was in danger from a Great Comet whose tail was 'ten hundred thousand and fourteen miles long'.
If you exchange the Great Comet with Climate Change and their repeated predictions of doom and disaster you can see where Clive James is taking us. He also adds, for the sake of statistics, that it might be more likely the Earth will be threatened by a comet or asteroid as it has, after all, happened once before. However, I might add, climate change is unique. It is attributed to evil human behaviour – and is a mirage, visible in climate models but invisible in the real world. Going back to James, he also says, Swift has the language of artificial crisis exactly right, to the point we might have trouble deciding whether he invented it or merely copied it from scientific voices in his day (when fear of the Great Comet was rife). James Hansen is a Swift like character – equating trains full of coal to trains full of people on their way to Auschwitz. It seems there is still a lot of bite in the old codger yet. Long may Clive James live – and write.