The anonymous editorialist at The Australian, and the wisdom of poetry ...

Just yesterday I was having a go at Einstein and Newton and giving them a real doing over. Yes, the buggers have got nothing better to do than pop inside my skull and torment me with their devilry.

I gave as good as I got, as I explained in tedious detail, how - instead of wasting our time and theirs in scientific study - the world would have been much better if they'd devised their wacky zany scientific theories on the basis on poetry, with the incidental benefit that it also put C. P. Snow's 'two culture' theory back in its box.

Newton could have got to the truth of the matter a lot quicker if he'd simply remembered Shakespeare's line What doth gravity out of his bed at midnight? And if only Einstein had remembered Eliot's remark that relativity impels us towards the Absolute, we'd already have a unified field theory. As for Charles Darwin saying that he'd tried to read Shakespeare and found it so intolerably dull, it nauseated him, we now know why we have a monkey's uncle standing in for the father of the theory of evolution.

Or could it be, in my usual way, that I've got it arse about, and have unfortunately been infected once again by the blathering idiocy of the anonymous editorialist at The Australian?

Yep, there's relentless asinine stupidity and then there's the anonymous editorialist at The Australian, giving vent to tosh in We love a sunburnt elder:

Reciting poetry while the roof falls in will get you nowhere, but Clive James is not the only one to find solace in verse these past few weeks as our region has been battered by nature. In The Weekend Australian, he used the poem we all know at least a little -- Dorothea Mackellar's My Country -- to argue there is nothing much new about the weather, despite the claims of climate alarmists.

Uh huh. There's nothing new about the weather ... and never mind the climate science, or for that matter ocean acidification.

How much better to conjure up an even handed scientific debate with talk of climate alarmists ... and poetry.

Do go on:

It was Mackellar, homesick in London a century ago, who recalled the polar opposites of the Australian weather, with its "droughts and flooding rains". She drew on her own empirical experience of the cycles of nature from "pitiless blue sky" to "steady, soaking rain". Today meteorologists talk of the oscillation of warming and cooling patterns known as El Nino and La Nina to explain the big floods after the big dry. Common to scientific and literary method is respect for history, yet the scaremongers seem afraid of memory.

Uh huh. Empirical experience. Out to the rain gauge in London to determine the weather in Australia year after year. Now there's a Gunnedah empiricist at work.

Scaremongers? They'd be mates with the alarmists, damn them and their evil ways. And so might we, to just round out the seemliness of it all, and enhance the calm measured atmosphere of rational discourse, call you, oh anonymous editorialist, a denialist twit?

I guess if you tell a big enough lie often enough - that scientists are scared of history, and afraid of memory - it might come to seem real enough, if you wag your finger and Dorothea Mackellar at the scientists firmly enough, and never mind the process whereby scientists scour the geological and historical records for clues as to what the weather might have been like many generations ago ...

Sure it does dirt on the average intelligence of anyone averagely intelligent, but lately The Australian seems pitched at just a dog's whistle above the moronic.

Even then, it takes a special kind of luddite scientific denialism to label scientists as luddites:

It does not suit their arguments against economic growth, industrialisation and modernity to listen to people over 40 who can recall the cycles of droughts and floods, and know that, as James puts it "banning certain categories of light bulb" will not be enough to tame nature.

Actually, being over forty, I can remember the asinine stupidities of Clive James when he was young - James made a career of mortifying himself in print, and publishing wretched poems - and I can recall his current follies almost as clearly, in much the same way as I can remember The Australian once attempting an intelligent, coherent, legible response to the world, instead of rabbiting on endlessly about inner suburban elites and Canberra conspiracies and poetry as a response to scientific theories ...

But I guess we've reached a scientific turning point whereby the equation √Clive James + Dorothea Mackellar + anonymous editorialist - alarmism - scare mongers = climate change science doesn't exist.

Hang on, news just to hand:

This newspaper gives the planet the benefit of the doubt on global warming and supports efforts to mitigate carbon.

Uh huh. But why? Where did the benefit of the doubt come from? Is it just because you wet your finger and stuck it up in the breeze, and it seemed like a fair thing at the time? Or did you just extract the digit from your bum, and that made you think, contrary to all the keenest poetical minds and experiences available, there might be something to it?

Do you doubt the strength of poetical scientific insight? Have you been swayed by the alarmists and scare mongers, or does being a goose come naturally all the time?

But we don't dismiss the recollections of older Australians or the cultural record of our artists as we seek to place natural disasters in context. Memories are sometimes short when it comes to the weather.

Uh huh. And now we look forward to you revealing your extensive records of scientists dissing artists and older folk. In the way you just did, by alleging old folk have poor or short memories.

So memories can be short but memories can be long, a bit like coffee, but we need memories - even if the old are forgetful - for context, even if we can't quite remember the context. Misty water-colored memories of the weather we once know, scattered pictures of thunderstorms and droughts we left behind ...

So now nostalgia and memories and cultural records and poems are in fact a firm basis on which to discuss scientific theories.

Does that mean the giant pain in the bum that I get when reading the The Australian indicates that a tsunami is likely within the next six months?

A summer's day can seem the hottest ever until you check the statistics and find it was just as warm a couple of years ago. Claims of rising sea levels can appear convincing until you ask an octogenarian surfer or two and discover that over the decades not much has changed on our beaches. In November 2009, we published pictures of Wollongong's North Beach taken 50 years apart, and which seemed to back the view that nature is "up and down, it comes and goes in cycles".

Check the statistics? Isn't that what climate scientists do? Shouldn't we be checking the statistical data collated by the empirical scientific poetic Dorothea Mackellear?

As for the beach at the 'Gong, yes, that should settle it. Two photos of a Wollongong beach is enough to convince me fifty years apart, especially when it's backed by a bit of cracker barrel philosophy worthy of a dickhead.

Well actually if you google the precise phrase, about coming and going in cycles, it only turns up in The Australian - in the work of the anonymous editorialist. Could the dickhead have decided that the best way to get a meaningful quote was to make one up? (try it for yourself here, and perhaps set up an email alert to see which other bright mind comes up with the phrase).

Okay, enough of all that. We're exhausted by the deep science revealed already. Since sententious stupidity is catching, isn't it about time we changed the subject to something completely irrelevant?

Wisdom is not restricted to the old, but it's worth listening to those who have seen the "cattle die" as well as the "grey clouds" gather. And not just about the weather. As we note today, 73-year-old David Seidler's Oscar for best original screenplay for The King's Speech is "one for an old guy". His success shows the vast knowledge, talent and experience of older people in our community. Far from being "grumpy old persons", they are valuable memory banks to tap.

I swear to the long absent god, my brain just lost ten IQ points, and quite likely will never recover. It might have been a valuable memory bank, the old noggin, but now it's gone down the drain, with as much vitality and insight as a brain-dead gherkin.

It takes a special skill to confuse age, memory, scientific data, subjective impressions, poetry, the weather and climate, and confabulate the lot into a mess of meaninglessness in just a few short pars .... but then it becomes painfully obvious that the anonymous editorialist has neither the wit nor science to hand to make sense of climate science, even to the point of sounding as specious as Lord Monckton, and so prefers to sound like a half-baked troglodyte celebrating old age, memory, poetry and The King's Speech, as if any of this has to do with anything, not least the science of climate change.

What on earth would C. P. Snow have made of this vapid vacuity?

Until we are willing to accept the world the way it is, without miracles that all empirical evidence argues against, without myths that distort our comprehension of nature, we are unlikely to bridge the divide between science and culture and, more important, we are unlikely to be fully ready to address the urgent technical challenges facing humanity. (here)

Ah gee, does that mean I have to give up reading the deadheads that scribble anonymous editorials for The Australian?

Oh pray sweet Knight, to make the day complete, sing Alice a song about the aged:

"Is it very long?" Alice asked, for she had heard a good deal of poetry that day.

"It's long," said the Knight, "but it's very, very beautiful. Everybody that hears me sing it--either it brings the tears into their eyes, or else--"

"Or else what?" said Alice, for the Knight had made a sudden pause.

"Or else it doesn't, you know. The name of the song is called 'Haddock's Eyes'."

"Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?" Alice said, trying to feel interested.

"No, you don't understand," the Knight said, looking a little vexed. "That's what the name is called. The name really is 'The Aged Aged Man'."

"Then I ought to have said 'That's what the song is called?'" Alice corrected herself.

"No, you oughtn't: that's quite another thing! The song is called 'Ways and Means': but that's only what it's called, you know!"

"Well, what is the song, then?" said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.

"I was coming to that," the Knight said. "The song really is 'A-sitting on a Gate': and the tune's my own invention."

Yes, that fits very well with the anonymous editorialist. And now a joke:

I see nobody on the road,' said Alice.
'I only wish I had such eyes,' the King remarked in a fretful tone. 'To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why, it's as much as I can do to see real people, by this light ...