It’s highly prescient and current. We’re in a groove reminiscent of Tulip mania, the South Sea Bubble, Y2K and the other mass hysteria that periodically and sequentially grip the human race. latterly we have the help/hindrance of a communications network that relays the minutest happening in the most isolated and distant place as soon as someone commits it to their keyboard. These things become a kind of lingua franca and there is the ongoing phenomena of urban myth, Chinese whispers and, as it has latterly been eulogised, spin. Imagine if each of us were connected and collectively we functioned as individual cells within a brain. When different groups of people got together it was like a neural pathway firing up and its field of dispersion was the issuing of various ideas and thought processes to be picked up by the rest of the cells and themselves become protagonists within the firing and activating of other neural pathways.

When you’re in it, it’s difficult to know. This is the goldfish bowl analogy; the idea that a fish is the last thing to know it is in water. We are like this too, we will be the last ones to know the folly or wisdom of our age, of our own lives and the decisions that we make. We commit to things, ideas, psychologies, beliefs and so on, and then stand or fall upon the basis of these choices. True, many of the choices are one horse races and at the time of choosing we didn’t always know there was a choice, this is the state that children find themselves in when they are mentored by the adults around them. Their choices are at the discretion of those who are responsible for their well being and it is to be hoped that those adults have executed their responsibilities with integrity, neutrality and the best possible outcome for the child as their guiding principle. Of course it is hard to speak with tongue placed firmly in cheek but there we are.

There is the famous story of the unfortunate Derek Rowe of Decca Records who rejected the Beatles after an audition on New Years Day 1962 saying “guitar groups are on the way out” and “the Beatles have no future in show business”. It illustrates graphically that there is no such thing as certainty in this life where the human arena is concerned. People assert expertise in areas where they can have no expertise other than observational. The greatest seers of our story have been partially correct but no one can predict the future with certainty.

Yet we are now in the grips of premonition fever. Climate change speculators vie with each other for more outrageous scare stories and they program computers to model potential outcomes in a doomsday scenario where the [programmers define the parameters. A wise general will choose his battle ground and then lure his adversaries forces into his killing zone to be assaulted, ambushed and vanquished with as little cost as possible to the wise general’s force. The weaver’s of doom are trying to select their ground in an adversarial presentation of the case. In all the best dramas there are good guys, there are bad guys and there is a nirvana like destination. The destination here is unclear, there are bountiful statements about ‘save the planet’ and some kind of Garden of Edenesque future awaiting the good guys once they vanquish the villains of the piece, who seem to be everyone else. Everyone else refers to the sadistically malevolent forces turning on lights, heating their homes in the depths of winter and getting from place to place. There seems to be a lobby bent on returning the human race to the Dark Ages literally and metaphorically.

When I was much younger I was turned on to the works of people like James Lovelock and Fred Hoyle and a host of other bright stars in the firmament of the collective human mind. The body of work produced by these people persuaded me that there was a sentient agency within the universe. Not the God of monotheism, the personal confessor who hears the prayers and administers justice for every believer who glances at a pretty girl’s décolletage or handsome boy’s pectoral muscles but an agency whose precise character I might only speculate upon that permeates the universe with order and a structural cohesion wherein its finest property we might conceive of, the human spirit, may be seeded in order for it to grow and develop into something autonomous capable of appreciating its absolute character. This at a time when it was not fashionable to think such thoughts, the 1970s, and indeed when we were being warned of the imminent new Ice Age about to engulf us all. That Ice Age never happened and became replaced by its polarity, the Global Warming. The Global Warming being the doctrine and rapidly mutating into the dogma of our age.

The Global Warming has its high priests and they have drawn their constituency into their belief system just as the wandering priests of the Middle Ages promised Hell, Purgatory and Redemption for a fee. Their mutant offspring, the witchfinders, then spread their mirth about the land declaring anyone whose gib they didn’t like the cut of to be in league with Satan, responsible for local calamity and so on and let’s face it, everyone likes a scapegoat. Alleged witches burned, neighbors settled old scores in kangaroo courts and ridiculous tests were devised for proving the voracity of an accuser’s claim or otherwise; woe betide the single woman with a cat, the man whose blisters from a hot iron healed too quickly or the poor sod who floated when thrown in the village pond.

This madness has now afflicted The Global Warming. The new religion is rushing to make itself feared and despised just as we have seen happen any number of times throughout history with unproven theses treated as though they were absolute truth. Here are some quotes that demonstrate just what kind of a mess people are hysterically getting into. Nothing is proven, theory remains theory until it is established as being unequivocally the case.

‘Only an insignificant fraction of scientists deny the global warming crisis. The time for debate is over. The science is settled.’

Al Gore 1992

‘This disaster is not set to happen in some science fiction future many years ahead, but in our lifetime.’

Tony Blair 2006

‘The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear.’

Barack Obama 2008

‘Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll back of the industrial age.’

Professor Richard Lindzen, the world’s leading atmospheric physicist and ‘climate scientist’ 2007