Delingpole Goes Totally Gaga

It had to happen: all those articles and blogposts which had advanced his cause not a jot, and the refusal of anyone who really matters to take him seriously, have sent the increasingly beleaguered figure of James “saviour of Western civilisation” Delingpole over the top in some style, as he has proclaimed “'Global warming' was always far too important to be left to the scientists”.

Definitely not even a little fair and balanced

Although, of course, Del Boy is still able to muster a set of Delingpole Patented Air Quotes (tm), much of his latest rant attempts to advance the idea that most of those ranged against him are “scientist manqué” arts graduates, as opposed to arts graduates such as Himself Personally Now, who are not “scientist manqué” at all, because he is not “impressed by men in white lab coats”.

Del Boy asserts that he and those of like mind in the arts graduate category have “done so with confidence not because we're scientists but, rather, precisely because we're not scientists”. He underscores this by quoting Lawrence Solomon, who is a fossil fuel lobbyist, and who, by sheer coincidence, decries man made climate change and is against both nuclear and hydro-electric power.

Solomon sneers at scientists, but then sells the pass in no style at all as he tells “Any child can understand that the Romans conquered the world when temperatures were warmer than today, that the Dutch invented the ice skates during the Little Ice Age five hundred years ago, and that melting glaciers off Newfoundland a century ago produced the iceberg that sunk the Titanic”.

Icebergs, as the passengers and crew of the Titanic discovered, are a phenomenon that occurs as a result of temperatures rising not as a result of climate change, but winter giving way to spring: the collision and sinking occurred in April 1912. Solomon confuses seasonal with longer term changes in temperature, and to anyone but the denial lobby this howler should be blindingly obvious.

Delingpole, however, carries on undaunted, asserting that the climate change debate isn’t about science, but is “just another proxy conflict in the culture wars: between those who believe in limited government, low taxation (etc.)” ... and “those who believe in an ever-enlarging state (etc.)”. And he is wrong once again: that is what he and his pals are trying to turn it into, as with so much else.

But Del Boy is right about one thing: “It's not a science degree you need to negotiate the complexities of this tottering edifice of propaganda, tortured data, lies, misinformation, political wrangling, rampant greed, corporatist manoeuvring and establishment cover-ups”. You’re so right Del, all you need to fillet the barrage of brown stuff coming from you is a good bullshit detector.

And right now, mine suggests Del Boy is a complete clown. No change there, then.