A great essay by Clive James

 (image by free-photos.biz)

Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet and memoirist Clive James dares to challenge the global warming/climate change orthodoxy. His new esssay "The drumming of an army" makes great reading. Here is an excerpt:

Before the floods, proponents of the CAGW view had argued that there would never be enough rain again, because of Climate Change. When it became clear that there might be more than enough rain, the view was adapted: the floods, too, were the result of Climate Change. In other words, they were something unprecedented. Those opposing this view — those who believed that in Australia nothing could be less unprecedented than a flood unless it was a drought — took to quoting Dorothea Mackellar's poem "My Country", which until recently every Australian youngster was obliged to hear recited in school. In my day we sometimes had to recite it ourselves, and weren't allowed to go home until we had given evidence that we could remember at least the first four lines of the second stanza, which runs like this. 

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror —
The wide brown land for me.

The first four lines of the stanza are the bit that everybody knows, partly because they are so addictively crafted, and partly because they fit the national experience of what Australia's geography and climate are actually like. In any household, the seniors (known in Australia as "the wrinklies") remember the droughts and the flooding rains of their childhood. I myself remember the Maitland floods of the early 1950s. The whole of the central seaboard of New South Wales was under water. I can remember rain you couldn't see through: right there in my southern suburb of Sydney, the creek flooded the park, and the lake in the park spilled into the bottom of our street, prompting the construction of a galvanised iron canoe in which three of us sailed to what would have been certain death if the contraption had floated for more than a few seconds.  

All three of us are old men now, of differing achievements and views, but none of us would be easily persuaded that the recent floods were a new thing.

Read the entire essay here.

PS

I also liked this comment to the essay by Peter Rhodes:

Climate change may or may not be happening but if it is, it has nothing to do with man.The only man made thing about climate change is the way government has seized on it to tax us all more and making objection to these taxes heresy.