One of Britain’s and Northern Europe’s rarest and most elusive mammals has been discovered living in the East of England for the first time in 115 years
And now for some good news. One of Britain’s and Northern Europe’s rarest and most elusive mammals has been discovered living in the East of England for the first time in 115 years.
Revealing this happy development, the Guardian said: ‘The return to Kent of the greater horseshoe bat has delighted and astounded conservationists.’
But what is the reason for the unexpected return of this creature with its ‘distinctive, alien-like ultrasonic warbling signals’? According to a spokesman for the Bat Conversation Trust, it seems possible that ‘the species is now able to expand its range into Kent due to climate changes’.
But isn’t climate change meant to be an ecological disaster for every living thing on the planet? That’s the Guardian’s usual line, and it is definitely the view of the eco-protest group known as Extinction Rebellion, which from today is launching ‘mass-disruption’ in our capital city as part of its attempt to bully politicians to make the UK ‘net carbon zero by 2025’.
But isn’t climate change meant to be an ecological disaster for every living thing on the planet? That’s the Guardian’s usual line, and it is definitely the view of the eco-protest group known as Extinction Rebellion, which from today is launching ‘mass-disruption’ in our capital city as part of its attempt to bully politicians to make the UK ‘net carbon zero by 2025’
Furnace
Actually, I wonder why they bother, since the co-founder and leader of Extinction Rebellion, Roger Hallam, told the Sunday Times: ‘We’re all going to be dead soon, so there’s nothing else to do.’
In like spirit, the 16-year-old Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg declares that unless we immediately switch to a form of existence not seen since before the Industrial Revolution, she and others of her age will not grow up to have children of their own because Earth will very soon be an uninhabitable furnace.
The same approach is championed in America by the no less charismatic 29-year-old Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who declaims: ‘The world is going to end in 12 years’ — not 11 or 13 years, she’s most precise — ‘if we don’t address climate change.’
Actually, I wonder why they bother, since the co-founder and leader of Extinction Rebellion, Roger Hallam, told the Sunday Times: ‘We’re all going to be dead soon, so there’s nothing else to do’
The only problem with this is that it isn’t true. Not remotely so. What is true is that if, in line with Hallam’s demands, we revert to what he enthusiastically describes as ‘a peasant orientation which obviously has been completely lost in Western society’, we will indeed witness a shortening of life expectancy and even the prospect of mass starvation (we might have to beg for food aid from rapidly industrialising China).
But what about our friends in the animal kingdom? Are they truly at imminent threat of global wipe-out as a result of the CO2 we emit?
Despite Extinction Rebellion’s message, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the UN body guided by the scientists in the field — says nothing of the kind. Its most recent report declares: ‘Overall, there is very low confidence that observed species extinctions can be attributed to recent climate warming, owing to the very low fraction of global extinctions that have been ascribed to climate change and the tenuous nature of most [such] attributions.’
Greener
In terms of the future, having modelled the effect of anticipated global increases in CO2 emissions from rapidly growing economies of the most populous nations, the IPCC states: ‘There is low agreement concerning the fraction of species at increased risk . . . and the timeframe over which extinctions could occur.’
But what’s the story to date? What you won’t hear so much about is that a certain amount of warming is, on balance, a good thing for species, including humans.
As a result partly of man-made CO2 emissions, Earth has actually become greener. Dr Ranga Myneni of Boston University has demonstrated by analysing data from satellite images of the planet, that 31 per cent of the global vegetated surface of the Earth has become greener over the past three decades, and only 3 per cent has become less green. It’s not called the ‘greenhouse effect’ for nothing.
But what about Africa, said to be the biggest likely victim of climate change?
While increased temperatures might save tens of thousands of lives a year in Northern Europe, where cold bears off so many mostly elderly people in winter, they are less likely to be a boon nearer the Equator. Yet it turns out those satellite images have also shown a marked greening in dry areas such as the Sahel in Africa.
As best-selling science writer Dr Matt Ridley observed: ‘The decline of famines in the Sahel in recent years is partly due to more rainfall caused by moderate warming and partly due to more carbon dioxide itself: more greenery for goats to eat means more greenery left over for gazelles, so entire ecosytems have benefited.’
Perverse
The key fact to bear in mind is that CO2 is not, in itself, a pollutant; nor detrimental to the air we breathe. The problem for us is the sooty particulates that come out of the exhaust of vehicles powered by internal combustion engines. They really do kill.
Diesel engines produce far more of these dangerous emissions than petrol ones — yet because of the fixation with ‘man-made climate change’, the British government massively incentivised, through the tax system, a switch to diesel from petrol because the latter produced more CO2 per unit of energy.
What a perverse, self-annihilating strategy. I’m glad I’ve got an 11-year-old hybrid petrol-electric car, though I don’t delude myself that it will ‘help save the planet’.
Of course, the Extinction Rebellion demonstrators are against all forms of motorised transport; indeed, every modern form of travel. As even a reasonably supportive article in the New Internationalist explained, under the policies of Extinction Rebellion: ‘Energy would be strictly rationed, dedicated to survival . . . expect massive disruption in the way food is grown, processed and distributed . . . there would be virtually no private car use, aviation, haulage or shipping.’
We would be living in an eco-fascist dystopia. In short: completely bats.
In like spirit, the 16-year-old Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg (left) declares that unless we immediately switch to a form of existence not seen since before the Industrial Revolution, she and others of her age will not grow up to have children of their own because Earth will very soon be an uninhabitable furnace. The same approach is championed in America by the no less charismatic 29-year-old Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (right)
HERE’S A THOUGHT: LET’S BIN RADIO 4’S ‘GOD SLOT’
Competitions have been run to find the most dispiriting regularly heard words in the English language. ‘Unexpected item in the bagging area’ would win, for many. Others might nominate ‘See it. Say it. Sorted.’
But for my part, ‘And now it’s time for Thought for the Day with Indarjit Singh’ can hardly be bettered (or rather, worsened). That has always had me lurching with unwonted energy for the radio off-switch.
So it was not with the deepest regret that I read Lord Singh has quit Radio Four’s Thought For The Day.
But for my part, ‘And now it’s time for Thought for the Day with Indarjit Singh’ can hardly be bettered (or rather, worsened). That has always had me lurching with unwonted energy for the radio off-switch. So it was not with the deepest regret that I read Lord Singh has quit Radio Four’s Thought For The Day
He does so in protest at what he sees as censorship by the ‘politically correct thought police’ of the BBC: they stopped him devoting his radio sermon last November to the ‘martyrdom of Guru Tegh Bahadur’, apparently because they thought it would offend Muslims.
To think we had been denied such a thrilling episode of Thought For The Day!
Perhaps the only Thought For The Day preacher who managed to sound as if he was talking to us, rather than at us, was Rabbi Lionel Blue
In fact the so-called ‘God Slot’ is reliably soporific, no matter which of the regular speakers is called upon. And that is not just because the BBC, as we now learn from Lord Singh, is determined to block anything that might cause a little religious controversy.
The trouble is that all the sermonisers read from a prepared script. These are trite lectures, delivered with not a scintilla of spontaneity.
Perhaps the only Thought For The Day preacher who managed to sound as if he was talking to us, rather than at us, was Rabbi Lionel Blue.
Alas, ill-health took him off the airwaves in 2012 (he sounded painfully out-of-breath in his final broadcast, and died in 2016).
It was no accident that Rabbi Blue, with his wonderfully conversational and intimate style, was the only Thought For The Day speaker whom even the most secular listeners engaged with — and missed.
So it’s not just the absence of Lord Singh’s sermons I suspect the nation can endure without going into a state of mourning — but the whole lot of the current Thought For The Day crew.