I was in Adelaide yesterday to do some buying for my shop, and was interrupted in my travels about the city by about 100 scruffy-looking characters on bicycles. Some of them had painted the number 350 on their clothes and some were wearing costumes with bits of green ribbon hanging off, so they all like looked like a bunch of overgrown kindergarteners on their way home from a very bad fingerpainting and dress-up party. They were shouting about something, but I couldn’t hear what it was, and anyway, I was in a hurry to get what I needed done in time to get back to Cape Jervis to catch the last ferry home that night.

When I got home I googled 350. I was assuming the scribbles had some meaning – which of course might not have been the case. But I found this: 350.org

What a dismal, dishonest, self-important little website it is.

A ‘ring of hope’ around the White House, with a banner claiming its bearers are against pollution and poverty. They are not. They are against the use of cheap energy which has extended our life span, reduced infant mortality, and given vast numbers of people the biggest and quickest ever boost out of poverty. More like a ring of grim ignorance which would, if their policies were implemented, keep life in developing nations nasty, brutish and short.

A photo of a nibble of nerds in a burnt out piece of Victorian forest, with the entirely dishonest suggestion that those fires were the result of anthropogenic climate change.

Do any of these people read or think?

Do any of them realise there is no correlation whatever between human production of CO2 and changes in climate? Do any of them know or care that increased CO2 will reduce desertification, increase agricultural production and therefore reduce hunger, and make the world a greener place?

The Western world has been taken over by zombies.

Well maybe not. Adelaide is a city of just over a million people. If only 100 or so turned out for the world day of climate dumbness, then only 0.0001 percent of the population of Adeladie is zombies.

The problem is that zombies seem to be running the media. In Australia it is quite possible the politicians are going to do what the zombies tell them. This means implementing an appallingly stupid RAT (Ration and Tax) scheme to reduce CO2 emissions. Or rather to send CO2 emissions off-shore. That is, to send industry and employment off-shore.

As Blind Freddy could see, this will have no effect at all on climate (and wouldn’t even if the climate disaster predictions were true) but will radically increase the costs of operating Australia’s major industries and transport.