Here’s a thing. Not a single British newspaper yesterday thought to put the Cancun climate change summit in the first 10 pages. The Daily Telegraph had it farthest forward, on page 12, but had disguised it as a story about World War II so that nobody noticed. It has pages twice the size of everybody else’s, anyway, so that doesn’t count.
Now you could take this if you were so minded (and probably possessed of string-backed driving gloves and robust views on immigration) as a great and positive sign that the world has finally accepted that climate change is a myth dreamt up by particularly creative communists.
Yet anybody, if they are honest, must accept that this isn’t really what has happened. The reporting of the climate change summit reflects the level of general interest that the subject currently generates, which is nil.
The great triumph of all those mislabelled sceptics this past year has not been to expose climate science as a lie, but to expose it as being so incredibly, paralysingly boring. This scientist sent that e-mail, and this dataset came from that weather station, and oh my God I’m having so little fun I could eat my own knee. It’s like a great, global Neighbourhood Watch meeting.
You’d like to help, you really would. You’re just not sure you have the strength to sit there while the man in the raincoat drones on for another two hours.
The most horrifying thing about Cancun isn’t the dire predictions that scientists are offering up, still, about the state of the world over the next century. It’s that they’ve given up trying to persuade anybody to do anything about it. Instead of suggesting that we ought to cut CO2 emissions, they’re now suggesting we build dykes and flood defences so that, given that we plainly aren’t really going to cut anything, ever, not too many people will die.
Alas, the world is already so miserably bored with the whole thing that it probably won’t ever agree to do even that.
Climate change has become like that lump in your armpit that you can’t face going to the doctor about. “It’s nothing,” you tell yourself. “It’ll go away.” But deep down, you know perfectly well that you’re not fooling anybody. Because it isn’t, and it won’t.
