In which the pond tries to avoid our Henry and chortling Claire, but eventually succumbs ...

 

Back in the day, the pond used to take reptile climate science denialism seriously, offer facts and refutations, dispute and lament, and generally carry on like a pork chop. 

But age, familiarity, laziness, contempt, and such like added up to wry bemusement and an attempt to find entertainment, as the planet alternately burned and flooded ...

How good is it then that someone still bothers to point out the enormous stupidity involved? 

It's a little late, but before getting down to this day's reptile business, the pond would like to do a tip of the hat to Graham Readfearn for his take down of the Major in The Australian reheats discredited climate claims in Cop ‘fact check’.

In its usual lazy way, the pond had let the Major off, and just ran the screed, because everyone knows that the Major as climate scientist is a vector for undiluted bullshit.

Besides, it's a Sisyphean task or an Augean stables duty if you will, and likely the Major will be back at it next Monday, unrepentant and still as lamentable and ignorant as ever, but please allow the pond to quote a little redeeming Readfearn as a pointer to his piece ...

So how did some of Mitchell’s own “facts” stand up?
In an apparent effort to undermine the nature of global temperature rise, Mitchell wrote: “Evidence suggests temperatures were higher during the medieval warming and the Roman warming.”
Actually, evidence does not suggest this. The latest United Nations assessment of climate studies says the world is warmer now than at any time over at least the past 100,000 years.
The medieval warming period (MWP) occurred roughly between 950AD and 1,250AD – although there’s slight disagreement on the start and end dates. The Roman warming period covered the first few centuries AD. Both were regional, not global.
A 2019 study in Nature of temperatures in these periods, the authors wrote, “provides further evidence of the unprecedented nature of anthropogenic global warming in the context of the past 2,000 years”.
Mitchell wrote: “Global temperature sits about 1.2C above the pre-industrial era, which also coincided with a little ice age.”
Prof Nerilie Abram, an expert in ancient climates at the Australian National University, said the little ice age lasted a few centuries, but was considered over by 1850 – the start of the 50-year period that scientists use to refer to “pre-industrial”.

And so on, andas the pond keeps running the Major , it's duty bound to honour those who take the time and trouble to point out the details of his enormous fuckwittery.

And so to another reading and an issue that has irritated the pond, and it involves the other side of the coin, well-meaning people who think attacking art works and museums will somehow phase the Major and his climate science denialism.

Jonathan Jones had a go at that notion in What next, petrol on a Picasso? Threatening art is no answer to the climate crisis.

Well, yes ...

Another day, another gallery: the attacks on art in the name of climate action have become a headline-hogging obsession with a hideous escalating logic. The nastier the treatment a famous masterpiece gets, the bigger the media coverage.

Now, members of Letzte Generation Österreich (Last Generation Austria) have smeared “non-toxic fake oil” all over the glass covering of Gustav Klimt’s Death and Life, a colouristic vision of pink and gold intertwined human bodies menaced by the grim reaper. Not that you can see much of that in the disturbing images of the attack at the Leopold Museum in Vienna: a black and purple stain all but obscures the delicate picture. The aggression of the attack takes this wave of action a step further than tomato soup on Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers and mashed potato on a Monet. But a step further to where?

There’s no chance of governments changing their policies because of these protests. There’s every chance, however, that a great work of art will eventually be destroyed.

The action in Vienna makes that horribly obvious. This is iconoclasm. There’s a deliberate flirtation with destroying art, an implicit threat to go all the way, which expresses contempt for art and the museums that try to conserve and protect it.

I can’t pretend to respect this form of protest. It makes no sense and possesses no moral coherence. It is arrogant to go into a museum and assume everyone around you is some kind of complacent aesthete who doesn’t care about the environment. “What is worth more? Art or life?” asked the Just Stop Oil activists who threw the tomato soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. What a ridiculously false debate. Loving art does not devalue life – on the contrary, it helps us value and see nature. All the art in the National Gallery in London, where the soup attack happened, from Giotto to Van Gogh, is based on looking hard at life. It praises our planet.

It's true that Jones gets a bit carried away. Speaking of Picasso, the notion that Picasso's Guernica might be construed as praise of the planet is pushing the envelope. It's true that the Picasso isn't in London, but is on show in Madrid, but if you stay in Spain, how to explain Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son as praising the planet? It knocked the pond for six when seen in the flesh, just as Van Gogh sans ear seems to be more about a nervous breakdown than praising the planet... and that can be found in the National Gallery's listing of his works ...

But the essential point remains true. The Major at all times shows exactly the same sensibility as those that are attacking artworks ...a luddite insensibility linked to fundamentalism.

At this point, some might wonder what to do, if rational arguments and the compilation of scientific facts won't work, and attacking artworks just displays enormous stupidity of the kind shared by fundamentalists since the great days of iconoclasm in the Reformation, so the pond will hastily move on to the real duty of the day, a serve of both siderism from the hole in the bucket man ...

The way that this game works is for the reptile scribbler to hold up hands in horror, and propose that both sides are equally bad, even as the evidence suggests that the Murdochians spent years supporting a coup-loving wannabe authoritarian autocrat anxious to imitate Chairman Xi in the administration of justice ... (trial and execution guaranteed in a day)..

This is, to use a modern notion of an ancient Greek school, mere sophistry, which is to say someone doing a Major Mitchell, with fallacious arguments and reasoning ...

It's the old pox on both their houses line, beloved by Bob Ellis on a gloomy day, and it's as ancient as Pontius Pilate calling for a bowl of water ...

But it does allow the pond to revert to form and turn to a cartoon-led recovery ... though first up the pond should acknowledge a treasured correspondent's link to a tweet ... (how long will the linking last?)

What's fun about the tweet is not so much the content - the delusions are common and can still be found every day on Faux Noise, though more muted than before - as the form, which presents a series of shrieking cries of pain in the form of an end credits movie roller ...

Back to our Henry, still trying to pretend that QAnon afflicts both sides, and that talk of the coming storm doesn't involve Major Mitchell's climate science denialism ...

Viewed as a whole, this is just the sort of bullshit that the pond expects from the venerable pundit ... and even worse, he's left his usual blather about the ancient Greeks and Romans in the closet.

You can't talk of being hinged, when one party is deeply unhinged and in thrall to a prize loon ...

It takes an extraordinary set of blinkers to blather about all this in a both-siderist way without noting the damage done by Faux Noise, the far right, and the mango Mussolini, but our Henry long ago earned his blinkers by thinking you can fix the hole in the bucket with straw ...

What the fuck is the dear old loon on? Can't he just come out and say it? Can't he forget the ancient Greeks, ignore that neutered WSJ click bait video and turn back to another movie reference?

Or sigh at the sky?

Sometimes there's not both sides, sometimes you have to realise which side made the mess and needs to clean up the mess ... and fear-mongering about the dangers of the left is actually straight out of the orange Jesus's increasingly tattered playbook ...

You know,  blather about both parties veering to the extremes or failing to note the Clarence and Ginni are loons on hand to help others make the Supreme Court seem like a bunch of 'handmaid's' in service to a barking mad group of fundamentalist Xians, People of Praise (sorry, WaPo paywall). (And let's not mention the IPA's Gina hanging out with the My Pillow guy and serving as Australia's chief Trumpette ...)

Sorry, there's still a bull in the china shop, and the Murdochians helped put him there, and that threatening future is on them, and no amount of both siderist bullshit should obscure that truth ...

And so to the bonus, and here the pond faced a dilemma ...

There was Dame Slap, ranting in a malevolent way about the Higgins matter again, despite a plea by the judge for the reptiles to give it a rest...

Instead, the reptiles put the rant at the top of the tree killer edition pile of reptile horseshyte ...

The pond refuses to go there - for the sake of the long absent lord, the suffering judge and the next trial, just give it a rest - and so the pond was left with chortling Claire taking easy pot shots at tech ... and about the only reason to go with it is that she did what our Henry didn't do ... start out with the ancient Greeks.

Poor Elon is such an easy target, and the pond has played that game ... and will likely continue to play it, because the memes are fun ...

But where was our Claire when it came to the gig economy and the abuse of workers and the sort of exploitation delivered by Deliveroo until it stopped delivering? Probably off with the Groaner, talking about efficiencies and such like, which makes the rest of the following so rich ...

The trouble with all this is that it's a bit like sending a paper plane at a sociopath, if the pond might borrow that thought from the immortal Rowe ...

There's more to life than the Twitterverse or the Metaverse or the Facebookverse - the pond has survived quite happily without any of them -and if vulgar youff chose to dance in the crypto minefield, let them lose their money how they will ... 

It's not much different from an addiction to poker machines in the local club, or the pond's belief that one day its numbers will land ... and the result's much the same ...

What joy to be able to agonise about all this stuff, as compared to a Russian missile landing in your backyard ...

The pond really couldn't given tuppence worth of care if Zuck or the Musk implode, but it does provide passing entertainment ...

And there's the problem in a nutshell. The days that the pond did a six paragraph blog post are long gone ...

Instead the pond is full of chunks of reptile junk food, Major Mitchell climate science denialism, and our Henry incapable of fixing a single bucket or political party, occasionally redeemed by a cartoon-led recovery ...