Analogies don’t get more dead than this one. Whole sentences have been killed in the quest for a soothing salad. The poor souls at Reneweconomy …
A Valiant Eco-Worrier, Evan Stamatiou, imagines climate change as an influenza pandemic.
If you imagine climate change as a flu that the world is coming down with, then you could probably say that the physical symptoms are only just starting to be felt.
On the other hand, thinks Jo, if you imagine climate change as like the tide, then you don’t bother trying to stop it.
On the third hand (which is really my foot) I don’t imagine anything. Instead I hop along to a tide gauge and check the data. At 1mm a year, this is a flu that will hit in 3016. Panic in 500 years then.
….interventions to fight the symptoms of ‘Climate Flu’ still touch on a raw nerve for so many today.
No sir. “Interventions” to fight Climate Flu don’t touch any raw nerves at all. Skeptics couldn’t care less if someone wants to hand-wash their hair shirt and drive a hybrid. What touches a nerve are the way people with imaginary illnesses want to force everyone else to buy a hair shirt and wear it.
And so it’s worth revisiting the question; why such a persistent resistance to these interventions?
Why? Because the salesman is selling a dead duck (with a hair shirt). They want us to pay thousands to set up infrasonic shaking towers that might slow floods in Zaire? — We don’t want one thank you.
Besides the interventions were only ever going to fight “symptoms” (that’s your word Evan). We all know Aspirin doesn’t cure influenza, and we all know solar panels don’t stop storms.
I defy anyone to rewrite this next para as one meaningful sentence:
One obvious explanation is that as Climate Flu remains relatively asymptomatic it also remains convenient to ignore the progressive onset of its symptoms, even deny its very existence. And this bias towards denialism is reinforced by the fact that Climate Flu has become an incredibly inconvenient problem to deal with.
Somehow climate flu remains “relatively asymptomatic” but has become “incredibly inconvenient” at the same time. Call it Schrodinger’s Flu. Somehow, this is “obvious”? Look out, the hint of sniffle is SARS; activate the isolation ward, and lock down the nation! That would be asymptomatic and inconvenient…
It’s a keyword salad. The only burning question is if Evan Stamatiou is real or a robot.
I could go on (he does) but the gist is that the magical cure is a rare herb called bipartisan politicus.
Bipartisan politicus apparently acts to simultaneously reduce debt and stimulate the economy by attacking waste and dysfunction created in toxic political environments (think Australia’s energy market). It also prevents ‘pop-up’ government schemes and programs from being designed and implemented – only then to be binned, thereby saving the Government countless more millions.
He has the right idea. If only he could see the field full of bipartisan politicus growing on the Plains of Common Sense. Hardly any politician ever visits the Great Plains where 61% of the population lives. There they’d find that Bipartisan flowers could bloom when policies are designed to tackle actual diseases instead of imaginary ones.
A warmist, when feeling quite blue,
Presented with climate-change flu,
To a doctor, a skeptic,
Who went near apoplectic,
When the patient blamed more CO2.
— Ruairi