As the people of the Three Kingdoms* shovel the unseasonal snow off their cars and listen on their radios to the journalists speculating on the newest attempts to combat Global Warming, I marvel that they accept these contradictions with such dazed passivity. (What is the Official Explanation? Is it the old notion that Warming will make the polar ice-cap disgorge massive icebergs which will then divert the Gulf Stream from our shores?) Happily, someone has dug up a piece from the Indescribably Boring in March 2000 about how Global Warming means that snow is pretty well a thing of the past as far as Britain is concerned. It cites the gurus of the Climatic Research Unit at the soi disant University of East Anglia as saying that snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event". (I rather think that these may be the jokers who got their fingers badly burned a few months ago when leaked emails led to unkind suggestions that they were doing an amusing line in suppressio veri.)
I went agnostic on all this business a few months ago, when the politically correct classes used the infallibility inherent in their new secular Magisterium to condemn "Global Warming Deniers"; these people are presumably to be reprobated and, soon, to be imprisoned, just like those daft Holocaust Deniers (I emphatically state that I do not myself also question the overwhelming evidence about the appalling genocide, a crime easily comparable with the Armenian and Stalinist genocides of the last century, inflicted upon the Jews during the Hitler years).
I wonder if readers would like to construct a Tridentine-style anathema to express the newly defined heresy of Global Warming Denial? Or, if there is a difference, Climate Change Denial? To remind you of the genre, I offer my own attempt at an anathema to condemn Holocaust deniers.
Si quis negaverit sexagiens centena milia* Hebraeorum malevolentia Imperii Germanici Tertii per annos belli quod Alterum et Universale nuncupatur interempta esse: ANATHEMA SIT.
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*Three Kingdoms: the old way speaking about the British Isles - the Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland; technically obsolete (except among Jacobites who regard all 'statutes' since 1688 as null) since 1707 but still found in the pages of Jane Austen. Sexagiens etc. ... er ... is this how one does 6,000,000? The Lexicon Recentis Latinitatis offers milio and attributes it to Helfer.
... The Holy Greenpeace curses thee; St. Al of Gore curses thee; polar bears of the world curse thee . . .
ReplyDeleteHow big is Al Gore's carbon footprint?
ReplyDeleteAt least the size of Heathrow, I should think ... but he pontificates from the "Holy Sea"; that would be the Arctic.
Si quis dixerit homines posse caelum mutare, anathema sit.
ReplyDeleteMy use of the word "caelum" is, of course, intentional here. It can mean both "heaven" and "weather."
Fr the name of the blog that appears on my computer screen is "LITURGICAL NOTES". Merry Christmas Dale in the US.
ReplyDeleteThree "Kingdoms"? What about the Principality, not to mention the Province?
ReplyDeleteFather, those who believe that we are experiencing climate change will certainly point out to you the fact that one cannot take this storm or that cold/hot spell or that flood etc. and say "This was caused by global warming". However, over the past number of years there have been an increasing number of strange weather occurances of diverse kinds experienced throughout the world and taken in total these are felt to be the result of climate change.
ReplyDeleteBoth the Holy Father and the Patriarch of Constantinople are known to be concerned (but cautiously) by the matter of climate change but I don't know that either of them would be willing to issue your anathema.