While I was away being Radley’s Provocateur-in-Residence (yes, it went very well, thank you) someone calling himself Sai Gon Seamus (an expatriate Irishman living in Vietnam, I’m guessing) Tweeted this at me:
@JamesDelingpole Hey scumbag, just remember they hanged Lord Haw Haw.#Haiyan
If it hadn’t been for the hashtag, this would have puzzled me greatly. But I think I can roughly guess what he’s struggling to articulate. He’s saying: “As an evil climate change denier you are as bad as a Nazi propagandist. Just as William Joyce was hanged for his complicity with a regime responsible for so many deaths, so you deserve to die because of your partial responsibility for delaying the urgent action that might have prevented the occurrence of Typhoon Haiyan in which thousands needlessly died….” Something like that, anyway.
Well it goes almost without saying that the man is a prat. And a rather menacing, unpleasant-sounding, mentally unstable prat as that. But, unfortunately, it’s not just the out-and-out nutcases who have been pushing the Typhoon Haiyan = Another Deadly Sign Of Man-Made Climate Change line. Here, for example, is the BBC’s Roger Harrabin having a go.
Here’s another arch-alarmist – Jeff Sachs of the Columbia Earth Institute – trying it on.
Here’s some desperate bloke from the Mirror having a pop.
And here’s the head of Filipino delegation at the Warsaw climate conference who set the ball rolling with his emotive, tearful plea for action, ending in the claim “We can stop this madness. Right now, right here.”
Well the response of the Filipino delegate you can understand and forgive: a) his family comes from the worst hit area of the Philippines; b) he’s a greenie delegate at a greenie climate conference so he’s bound to view any extreme weather event in a doctrinaire way c) it’s his job, damn it. One of the things we’ve seen consistently throughout all the recent COP conferences is delegates from the developing world using “climate change” as a stick with which to beat and – more pertinently – try to extract more aid-money from the rich Western nations.
And it’s not just evil right-wingers like me who’ve noticed c). So too, even, have deep green card-carrying lefties like the Obama administration, which is revealed in the Guardian today to be very worried about the possibility that the US will end up having to fork out for all the damage ostensibly done to the Third World by allegedly man-made climate change. Gosh why does the phrase “hoist by your own petard” spring so satisfyingly to mind?
