Wake up in a straitjacket - you're about to be left out in the cold

Maurice O'Brien • Published 10 Dec 2009 09:00 0 Comments

ONE consolation for the ever decreasing number of psychiatric hospital beds is that it prevents our rulers using them as a penal threat.

Indeed you're more likely to meet the mentally ill or hopelessly addicted banged up in prison, with the key long since thrown away, than find them in a hospital.

However, with the current official tendency towards identity cards, snooping and nannying, that's good news for 'flat earthers' and the 'anti science' brigade so contemptuously dismissed by the Supreme Leader this week. Because, like the refuseniks of Soviet Russia, any hint of opposition to the mantra of man-made global warming and it's clearly time to be measured for your straitjacket.

Of course you can't expect Old Prudence, whose pigheaded handling of the economy has helped put Britain's finances into their most shambolic state for nearly a century, to understand sceptics or indeed the price of heat in China.

But let's not forget it's scientists who pronounce booze a killer one week and a tonic the next; and for booze also read aspirin, bread, meat etc. Remember acid rain, chicken flu, the millennium bug?

In the seventies we were hurtling towards an ice age. Then suddenly we weren't. Why? More sunlight was reaching the earth's surface. Why? Man-made pollution was actually decreasing.

Then there are the Met Office maestros who, if they use BBC TV weather charts, apparently convince themselves daily that the Irish Republic doesn't exist. Lock weather experts in a room with a bunch of scientists and we'll be expecting penguins on the garden bird table any day now.

Inevitably Copenhagen will produce winners and losers. How about the owners of the estimated 1,500 limousines, mostly running on petrol or diesel, ferrying the great and the good from their £650-a-night hotels? The carbon clodhopper-prints of planes transporting 34,000 delegates from 200 countries, or the executive jets too numerous to find airport parking spaces?

How about the food and drink consumption and resultant hot air? From either end.

Be careful how you answer. The stigma of flat-earthism awaits.

Failing that, there's always a mouthful of Malapropisms from Prescott or pompous lectures from the Miliband boys, whose point-scoring waffle is eerily reminiscent of the preliminary round losers in a school debating contest.

Why send dodgy emails, or peddle photographs of cuddly polar bears on melting ice floes in high summer, if the argument's so conclusive?

And just remember, when it turns out in 2050 that CO2 emissions haven't been halved, most of them will already be dead.

As for Satchelface Brown. Sticks and stones may break my bones…

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