David Southwell, and news from the war room in the battle with mother nature ...

(Above: teaching mother nature a lesson).

As it's Copenhagen season, and the air is full of blather, it takes a lot to cut through the blather, and announce a master mind has arrived on the scene.

Cue David Southwell, yet another Murdoch star, springboarding off NASA scientist James Hansen's comparison of climate change to the issue of slavery faced by Abraham Lincoln, or the issue of Nazism faced down by Winston Churchill.

If climate change is a battle, let's have a war, he muses, in what seems like a bid to be funny, but comes across like the waddling of a goose.

Well it's bemusing and bewitching and attention attracting, and surely it will get him onto the Murdoch battlements as a pfc, alongside Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt, where they can fart in the general direction of anyone listening.

Yep, the goose imagines we're at war with nature - a kind of Long Weekend, or perhaps an earlier Long Weekend, of a Punch column.

Noting that Churchill had to up industrial production and increase weaponry, Southwell suggests a similar strategy. Yep, like all the dumb generals of world war 11, he's busy fighting the last war, just like they managed to fight world war 1 until the blitzkreig sorted them out.

Yep, we need to up the weaponry for a full-scale assault on nature, as if nature gives a flying fuck as to whether we might go the way of the dinosaur.

Here's the venerable Southwell's idea of boxing clever:

If climate change presents as a credible menace to our way of life we would be silly to give up the great weapon of industrial civilisation - cheap power - in the hope that nature will take it easy on us.

To give ourselves the best fighting chance we shouldn’t contract our industrial base, we should expand it.

We need to be open to wider strategies than just reducing carbon, which because it is the by-product of cheap energy, no one really wants to do.

Forsaking the cheapest form of power is like poking ourselves economically in the eye with the expectation our ears will develop better hearing to compensate.

Um Southwell old chum, you won't be leaving oil, oil will be leaving you.

Never mind. You can't expect coherence or cogency from a rambling loon dominion-ist. Remember how god set up the play?

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

Yep, even unto the oil, until peak oil creepeth upon the creeping things.

But ain't it grand the way the intrepid Southwell is out there in the jungle, a veritable Fawcett of the Amazon, a Livingstone of Africa, as he dominates nature the way Arnie dominates an alien:

Greens won’t like this approach because it does not assume we should bow down to nature.

If humanity had always obeyed the dictates of nature humans we would still be huddled in comparatively small hunter/gatherer tribes on the plains of Africa.

We would die earlier.

Depending on food availability, life would either be relatively easy or we would starve.

We would live in constant fear of the elements and predators.

Entertainment would be mostly limited to wrestling and picking the nits out of each other’s fur.

Actually that sounds like the recreation options still favoured in some all male university dorms.

The old, sick or those vanquished in power struggles would be excluded from the tribe to die.

Life would be nasty brutish and short, in other words.

However once evolution gave us opposable thumbs and big forebrains it was game over.

What a rich fantasy life, what a splendid brain dump. Dominionism converted to the cause of evolutionary Darwinism and the video game:

Perhaps Mother Nature now wants to give us some weather whacks for getting too uppity, but let’s not land the first blows on ourselves.

Besides which we can take her. If she wants a piece of us as the video gamers might says: “Come and get some b!tch!”The best form of defence is offence, as sports coaches say.

So let’s not plot partial retreat to make Gaia happy but go unabashedly forward and realise the full panorama of human potential.

Indeed. Why am I reminded of General Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelov? He too shared a splendid vision of the future:

Dr. Strangelove: ... a computer could be set and programmed to accept factors from youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence, and a cross-section of necessary skills. Of course, it would be absolutely vital that our top government and military men be included to foster and impart the required principles of leadership and tradition. Naturally, they would breed prodigiously, eh? There would be much time, and little to do. Ha, ha. But ah, with the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present Gross National Product within say, twenty years...

... Turgidson: Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?

Dr. Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious...service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.

Russian Ambassador: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.

Oh alright, I admit it, I got bored reading Southwell and his macho take down fantasies about mother nature.

Dr. Strangelove is much funnier, and strangely, much less weird.

Because you know deep in the mire, the bog, of Southwell's musings you get the idea that he thinks he's offering up a genuine insight:

It’s time to take a positive rather than a negative approach.

Sure our government should fund research into climate change “solutions” in the same way the Allied powers bought whatever the labs and factories could produce to defeat the Nazis.

So much for superior weaponry and the atomic bomb, devised by boffins, when good old Southwell grit is enough for the job.

However the best solution to climate change, going by history, almost certainly does not involve a “top down” bureaucratic central regulatory restructure of the economy through rationing and tax, with some picking of winners (preferential subsidies for renewables while ruling out no nuclear power).

Why yes, in much the same way as the war against the black death was best managed without doctors, hospitals and anti-biotics, or societal funding of such weird scientific solutions.

And what wonderful parochialism, as Southwell rants on about us turning into East Germany, a socialist agenda devised mainly in Southwell's teeming fevered brain, as if somehow all parts of the world have currently ruled out nuclear power, and the model adopted in Australia is somehow the only navel gazing model we can think of, or imagine.

The winning strategy or idea may not involve trying to stop or minimise climate change at all but figuring out the best way to live with or adapt to it, which is what people generally do brilliantly to changed circumstance.

The best idea is probably still waiting to drop into someone’s head when the situation becomes clear.

Why it might even involve the imagination of scientists, rather than the doodled fantasies of Southwell. Or we might just all pack up and head off to a survivalist fantasy love in somewhere in Montana or perhaps in the green fields of Antarctica.

Enough already. Let's get back to a bit of decent fun about the military mindset and dare we say it armchair strategists who fancy that they're some kind of General Ripper:

President Merkin Muffley: Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room.