Edmund Burke once wrote: “Never despair, but if you do, work on in despair.” I just hope he would have made it to the end of this thread.

Let’s add a beautiful, tranquil backdrop.

That’s all very well, Mr BrainyQuote, but what work can we usefully do about climate alarm and its resultant, seemingly all-powerful, policy bandwagon?

It’s not just climate. The problem is, once we go to Donald Trump, or any other climate-related subject (we’ll always have Paris, as somebody on here said before me, but only until they re-ratify it) we tend to lose some admirable Cliscep contributors and lurkers. (The loss of the lurkers is an assumption on my part but it figures.)

If that doesn’t make you despair, what will?

I orginally had another design for this thread: to give some personal background to Provocation. There were connections between the first three tweets in the first section and the Bristol Eye Hospital, for me. That probably won’t have been obvious. But it speaks of a day when I overcame despair and it worked out pretty well, compared to the alternative. But I’m going to tell that story in the comments. The parts that can be told, given doctor-patient confidentiality. Except I wasn’t the doctor. Let me think more about this.

This is mainly about climate and the future of Cliscep, then. In the context of Edmund Burke’s highly illogical aphorism. “Never x, but if you do, y” That’s why I like it so much.