Has there ever
been a better story? It's like a version of Titanic where first class cheers
for the iceberg
By Mark Steyn
Yes, yes, just
to get the obligatory ‘of courses’ out of the way up front: of course ‘weather’
is not the same as ‘climate’; and of course the thickest iciest ice on record
could well be evidence of ‘global warming’, just as 40-and-sunny and a 35-below
blizzard and 12 degrees and partly cloudy with occasional showers are all
apparently manifestations of ‘climate change’; and of course the global
warm-mongers are entirely sincere in their belief that the massive carbon
footprint of their rescue operation can be offset by the planting of
wall-to-wall trees the length and breadth of Australia, Britain, America and
continental Europe.
But still: you’d
have to have a heart as cold and unmovable as Commonwealth Bay ice not to be
howling with laughter at the exquisite symbolic perfection of the Australasian
Antarctic Expedition ‘stuck in our own experiment’, as they put it. I confess I
was hoping it might all drag on a bit longer and the cultists of the ecopalypse
would find themselves drawing straws as to which of their number would be first
on the roasting spit. On Douglas Mawson’s original voyage, he and his surviving
comrade wound up having to eat their dogs. I’m not sure there were any on this
expedition, so they’d probably have to make do with the Guardian reporters. Forced to wait a year to be
rescued, Sir Douglas later recalled, ‘Several of my toes commenced to blacken
and fester near the tips.’ Now there’s a man who’s serious about reducing his
footprint.
But alas, eating
one’s shipmates and watching one’s extremities drop off one by one is not a
part of today’s high-end eco-doom tourism. Instead, the ice-locked warmists
uploaded chipper selfies to YouTube, as well as a self-composed New Year
singalong of such hearty un-self-awareness that it enraged even such party-line
climate alarmists as Andrew Revkin, the plonkingly earnest enviro-blogger of
the New York Times. A mere six weeks ago, pumping out the
usual boosterism, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that, had
Captain Scott picked his team as carefully as Professor Chris Turney, he would
have survived. Sadly, we’ll never know — although I’ll bet Captain Oates would
have been doing his ‘I am going out. I may be some time’ line about eight bars
into that New Year number.
Unlike Scott,
Amundsen and Mawson, Professor Turney took his wife and kids along for the
ride. And his scientists were outnumbered by wealthy tourists paying top dollar
for the privilege of cruising the end of the world. In today’s niche-market
travel industry, the Antarctic is a veritable Club Dread for upscale
ecopalyptics: think globally, cruise icily. The year before theAkademik Shokalskiy set sail, as part of Al Gore’s
‘Living On Thin Ice’ campaign (please, no tittering; it’s so puerile; every professor of climatology knows that
the thickest ice ever is a clear sign of thin ice, because as the oceans warm,
glaciers break off the Himalayas and are carried by El Ninja down the Gore
Stream past the Cape of Good Horn where they merge into the melting ice sheet,
named after the awareness-raising rapper Ice Sheet…
Where was I? Oh,
yeah. Anyway, as part of his ‘Living On Thin Ice’ campaign, Al Gore’s own
luxury Antarctic vessel boasted a line-up of celebrity cruisers unseen since
the 1979 season finale of The Love Boat —
among them the actor Tommy Lee Jones, the pop star Jason Mraz, the airline
entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson, the director of Titanic James Cameron, and the Bangladeshi
minister of forests Somebody Wossname. If Voyage of the Gored had
been a conventional disaster movie like The Poseidon Adventure,
the Bangladeshi guy would have been the first to drown, leaving only the
Nobel-winning climatologist (Miley Cyrus) and the maverick tree-ring researcher
(Ben Affleck) to twerk their way through the ice to safety. Instead, and very
regrettably, the SS Gore made it safely
home, and it fell to Professor Turney’s ship to play the role of our
generation’s Titanic. Unlike the original, this
time round the chaps in the first-class staterooms were rooting for the
iceberg: as the expedition’s marine ecologist Tracy Rogers told the BBC, ‘I
love it when the ice wins and we don’t.’ Up to a point. Like James
Cameron’s Titanic toffs, the
warm-mongers stampeded for the first fossil-fuelled choppers off the ice, while
the Russian crew were left to go down with the ship, or at any rate sit around
playing cards in the hold for another month or two.
But unlike you
flying off to visit your Auntie Mabel for a week, it’s all absolutely vital and
necessary. In the interests of saving the planet, IPCC honcho Rajendra Pachauri
demands the introduction of punitive aviation taxes and hotel electricity
allowances to deter the masses from travelling, while he flies 300,000 miles a
year on official ‘business’ and research for his recent warmographic novel in
which a climate activist travels the world bedding big-breasted women who are
amazed by his sustainable growth. (Seriously: ‘He removed his clothes and began
to feel Sajni’s body, caressing her voluptuous breasts.’ But don’t worry; every
sex scene is peer-reviewed.) No doubt his next one will boast an Antarctic
scene: Is that an ice core in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?
The AAE is
right: the warm-mongers are indeed ‘stuck in our own experiment’. Frozen to
their doomsday narrative like Jeff Daniels with his tongue stuck to the ski
lift in Dumb and Dumber, the Big Climate enforcers will
still not brook anyone rocking their boat. In December 2008 Al Gore predicted
the ‘entire North Polar ice cap will be gone in five years’. That would be
December last year. Oh, sure, it’s still here, but he got the general
trend-line correct, didn’t he? Arctic sea ice, December 2008: 12.5 million
square kilometres; Arctic sea ice, December 2013: 12.5 million square
kilometres.
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