You all know Willis Eschenbach from his hundreds of excellent articles at WattsUpWithThat. There’s a catalogue up to 2021 at a link that begins with https:// and ends with wattsupwiththat.com/2021/02/04/a-2021-index-to-williss-posts/

(I try too provide links, but WordPress just leaves empty spaces where I leave an URL. I have no idea how this article will appear. It’ll probably look like shit, but that’s WordPress for you.)

 

All his articles end with the warning: 

“As is my custom, I politely ask that when you comment, you quote the exact words that you are referring to, so we can all be totally clear about both what and who you are discussing.”

I’ve always admired his articles, and enjoyed the glimpses they afford of their author, who seems to me to this British ex-prat to be the archetypal American – a fearless, footloose, high-IQ adventurer ready to question everything. 

[It’s a sign of how low the USA has fallen that almost all of the Americans famous outside the United States nowadays are entertainers – millionaire narcissists who’ve never questioned anything other than their bank balance, or risked anything worse than falling audiences or record sales, or failing foreign contributions to their charity foundations.] 

Three of the great works of American literature – Moby Dick, Walden, and Leaves of Grass – start off in exactly the same way: A part-time supply teacher, bored with routine, decides to up sticks and do something different. Willis is in that tradition. His articles are a breath of Whitmanesque fresh air for Climate Sceptics; a Cabin in the Woods to shelter from the madness of the science; a battle with the Great White Wally of Climate Doom.   

I owe a debt to Willis. Eleven years ago, I wrote an article at WattsUpWithThat 

demolishing a crazed loon called Rowland Emett Stephen Emmott who had won fame as a climate catastrophist on the basis of headlines reading: “Cambridge Professor says: ‘We’re F*cked.’”*

*[He wasn’t a Cambridge Professor, but a nerd working for IBM based in Cambridge, and a “visiting professor” – i.e. someone who was invited to give a talk – at the University of Oxford. He wrote a programme predicting the future of Life, the Universe and Everything, which repeatedly crashed, enabling Emmett to gain instant fame with his naughty catchphrase, thanks to fellow doomers in the press & at Penguin Books (science section) as well as at such prestigious organisations as the BBC, the Science Museum, and the Royal Court Theatre.]

My article, as usual, was heavy on spleen but short on references. Willis kindly supplied me with all the data it lacked in a follow-up article

 – a heap of fascinating information on vertebrate species loss in the past 5 centuries from impeccable sources. Spot on and a welcome and unexpected gift. 

I had no contact with Willis until last year, when I started leaving approving, and, I hope, entertaining comments at his Twitter posts. (Willis, like many well-known climate sceptics, gets surprisingly little traffic. Shame on you all.)

Then, on December 7th last year, I commented at a tweet of his on Israel, disagreeing strongly. This conversation has continued regularly ever since. If you’re interested, the first thread starts here

You don’t have to read it. To give you a flavour, the latest episode (8th January) runs like this:

Willis: 

Letter to the editor in the LA Times: 

“Every writer who bemoans the devastation in the Gaza Strip without acknowledging its cause is like a person complaining about how horribly they’ve been mauled by a bear without admitting that the bear had been sleeping when they poked it in the eye with a stick and slaughtered a few of its cubs.”

Me:

Israel is not the ancestral homeland of the vast majority of Israelis. It’s the ancestral homeland of Palestinians, who have every right to poke in the eye with a stick those who stole their land.

Willis:

Keep believing that, Geoff. Israel was there on that spot thousands of years before Palestinians were dreamed of. It’s literally the only country where archaeologists find ancient coins and texts speaking of the same country in the same language from thousands of years before the present.

But none of that matters. What matters is that Israel was LEGALLY given the land by a vote of the UN in 1948. And every time the Palestinians have been stupid enough to poke them in the eye, tens of thousands of Palestinians have died.

Having watched them poke Israel in the eye over and over for my entire life time, I have exactly zero compassion for them. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Don’t come whining when your stupidity bites you in the fundamental orifice.

Me:

Do you really believe Londoners & New Yorkers have the right to turn Palestinians out of their homes because of something archaeologists found on ancient coins? It’s not possible. You’re Willis Eschenbach, a somewhat aggressive debater, but always on the side of reason, I thought.

It’s ongoing as I write. There is no possibility of either one of us convincing the other. I give credit to Willis for the fact that he has not blocked me, and I continue to give him Likes for all the sensible comments he makes on climate matters. We are civilised people.

That’s enough about Willis & me. This is an introductory chapter to something I intend to write about the massive change in the political landscape that started with climate hysteria and seems to be ending with the current war in the Middle East.

Briefly: The Left went mad when it caught climate hysteria, continued its descent into madness with its Trumpophobia and Covid Lockdown mania. The reasons for this are still obscure, but may be linked to a distortion of the idea of scientific socialism enunciated by Engels, a belief in the infallibility of officially designated experts, which caused immense damage in the Soviet Union. Whatever – the woke left finally awakened and came to reason when Elon Musk and others showed us what eight thousand dead babies look like, in the flesh, as it were.

The Left exists when it defends the oppressed against the oppressors; when the climate loonies & the rainbow-flag warriors forget their obsession with their personal neuroses and wave the Palestine flag. The Left claims to be the voice of Reason against the forces of Reaction, but it’s only effective when it acts under the influence of Emotion. Thanks to the bombing of Gaza, Politics has become normal again. The Left, from Roger Hallam to Jeremy Corbyn, is with Palestine. The Right, from Keir Starmer to the Nazis in power in Kiev (not that there’s much difference) is with Israel.   

While the Left is reverting to type as the defender of the oppressed, the Right has revealed its true colours by defending the racist state of Israel, as they defended Apartheid in South Africa. Jordan Peterson has tweeted to Benjamin Netanyahu: “Give ’em hell.” Toby Young retweeted a tweet from the Museum of Communist Terror about how Lenin starved millions of peasants to death. As the Loony Left quietly commits suicide-by-spray-paint, the Loony Right reasserts itself as the Spokesthing for World Wars Three, Four, undsoweiter.  

The Right, which was partly, and sometimes largely, right about climate, about Brexit, Trump, the fake 2020 US Presidential Election, and the sordid sex-and-race obsessed excesses of Wokeism, has had its own moment of Wokeness and realised that it’s fundamentally on the side of the winners (Israel) and against the losers (starving, powerless, bombed, murdered, tortured & mutilated Palestinians.)      

In the Covid time I wrote an article predicting that the errors made then would tarnish the reputation of scientific expertise for ever. It didn’t happen, at least not then, not at once. Public opinion doesn’t work like that, not immediately, at least. The shift didn’t happen.

Maybe it takes images of thousands of dead kids to shift public opinion? It’s certain that the graphs & statistics of climate & vaccine sceptics didn’t do it, and won’t, ever.  

 It seems to be happening now. It will affect the coming Labour government profoundly. They will be hated from both sides. And that will have an effect on their attempts to impose their suicidal Net Zero climate policy.

Which is a subject on which we all – left & right – agree, n’est-ce pas?