Long Live Proletarian Internationalism!

Martin Durkin, the denialist halfwit behind The Great Global Warming Swindle, has written an op-ed explaining why he rules, and the world climatological community drools.

It starts out with a bang:

When I agreed to make The Great Global Warming Swindle, I was warned a middle-class fatwa would be placed on my head.

You have to admire the amount of mythology Durkin managed to cram into this short sentence. There's denialism as brave defiance of a blinkered, oppressive orthodoxy. There's environmentalism as religion (and an alien, terroristic religion at that). There's the neocon brand of vulgar Marxism, which heaps scorn on the bourgeoisie for not consuming enough. And best of all, there's the hysterical victimology that conflates being contradicted by experts with getting lynched.

If global warming is real, Durkin asks, then why is everyone getting so upset about the opinions of a humble documentary filmmaker? Clearly, "they" have something to hide, or they'd simply ignore his dissent and get on with the important work of rebutting denialist agitprop. QED, motherfuckers!

Having liberated himself from the delusions of climate "science," Durkin is able to understand what's really going on. It seems that the middle class is angry because cheap airfares are cluttering up their favorite "exotic foreign places" with greasy, pockmarked proles. This has naturally led them to embrace the notion that human activities are affecting the climate. To contradict them, and point out that growth and globalization are intrinsically and eternally good, outrages them not because it's incorrect - how could it be? - but because it's "a grievous breach of social etiquette."

(If you imagine that Durkin himself is a member of the middle class, think again. He's more of a cheeky East End ragamuffin, as you can tell from his studious use of streetsmart verbiage like "vulgar oiks," "off their chump," "bally," and the fearsome "bugger-all.")

Since bourgie ressentiment is the sand on which the house of climate change is built, what ails the scientists who claim to have evidence for it? The answer is hinted at in the denialist mantra: everyone's stupid but me.

To the utter dismay of the global warming lobby, the world does not appear to be getting warmer. According to their own figures (from the UN-linked Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), the temperature has been static or slightly declining since 1998. The satellite data confirms this. This is clearly awkward. The least one should expect of global warming is that the Earth should be getting warmer.

The fact that scientists have concocted a rebuttal to this argument shows the lengths they'll go to hide from the Truth. It's enough to give a bloke the Joe Blakes.

Still, credit where it's due, and all that rot:

The man-made global warming parade, on one level, has been a phenomenal success. There isn't a political party or important public body or large corporation that doesn't feel compelled to pay lip service.

Compelled by what, precisely?

Well, dash it all, by that bloody buggery middle-class hauteur, don't you know, and...and...those blasted UN one-worlders who want an end to globalization. And those stuck-up stickybeaks who "hate plastic toys from factories and prefer wooden ones from craftsmen." And so on.

Fortunately, "thousands of wonderful, sane, bolshie [!] Australian viewers" know better than to listen to ponced-up gobshites like these, most of whom are too busy taking it up the Gary to give a monkey's chuff about the working man.

(Illustration at top: "Proletarians of all countries, unite!" by Dimitry Moor, 1919.)