Riding the Marrakech Express

All aboard the United Nations "last chance" gravy train, COP22. Hurry, you hippies, hucksters and hallucinogenic fellow travellers, hurry. Be quick, if you want a free ride on the Marrakech Express.

Hallucinogen:A drug that causes profound distortions in a person's perceptions of reality. People often see images, hear sounds, and feel sensations that seem real but do not exist. Some hallucinogens produce rapid and intense emotional swings, as seen last week in certain cohorts in North America, especially after passage (56 to 44 percent) of California Proposition 64legalising adult use of recreational marijuana in that state.

Could there be a more appropriate location than this exotic Moroccan city - immortalised by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young in the 1960s - to celebrate the global ambitions of the UN's Climate Caliphate? The intention is surely noble: two weeks getting high on self-congratulation, other people's money, junk science and the eco-worrier's favourite over-the-counter drug, DAGW (dangerous anthropogenic global warming), now rebranded as DACC (dangerous anthropogenic climate change) to entrench public credulity.

Climate-caliphate: 1. Entity led by a climate-caliph, generally an eco-zealot, ex-politician or career bureaucrat turned climate-control propagandist. 2. Global climate-caliphate: theocratic one-world government or de facto government. 3. Any ideology or aspiration promoted by a militant fossil fuel freesect, or 'champion of the Earth', such as UNEP. 4. Any radical group intending to behead, disembowel, or otherwise degrade Western economies with the two-edged sword of wealth redistribution (aka 'climate reparations') and 'decarbonisation', while reciting mantras about sustainability, slow-onset events and saving the planet. Also known as Agenda 21.

Last week's unscheduled arrival of the US Great Again train has, however, upset the Programme. It was arguably a black swan event; "the biggest FU in human history", according to Michael Moore (video here, 4.34min.).

As the news reverberated around the world, the climate establishment was shocked to discover that not all swans are white and female. So perhaps it also could be the case that not all "extreme weather events", or global temperature fluctuations, have much to do with a few hundred parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, if anything.

For many COP22 delegates, the clock of catastrophe suddenly shifted much closer to midnight. "A third of the people here are walking around like zombies, like the walking dead, not sure what to do," said UC Berkeley Professor Daniel Kammen, speaking from Morocco. Many believe the honeymoon is over (here).

Shock and disbelief marked Bab Ighli, the venue of the UN-sponsored climate meet. Even as delegates sought to retain an air of normalcy virtually every conversation turned to Trump, and what the elevation of a climate denier to the White House meant for the global efforts to tackle climate change. (GWPF)

That sound you can hear is not only the gnashing of teeth and blowing of pot-smoke. It is also the scurrying hither and thither of thousands of bureaucrats in a race against time. They are on an earnest mission to capture the chaos and complexity of the planet's climate in a net of jargon so opaque it will bamboozle even the most erudite disciple of truth and transparency.

UNFCCC's language is designed to give an appearance of solidity to nebulous "climate change"; and ensures the West is liable for all "loss and damage" – yet undefined – from any meteorological event that disrupts life in the developing world.

A recent addition to the UN's Orwellian climate lexicon is the "slow-onset event". It is bound to be useful to those involved with COP19's Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damageassociated with Climate Change Impacts; "the main vehicle under the Convention to promote the implementation of approaches to address loss and damage in a comprehensive, integrated and coherent manner."

Meanwhile, spare a thought for Senator John Kerry, one of the architects of last year's Paris Agreement, as he tries to salvage something from the wreckage. With the political ground shifting under him, Kerry appeared – not in Marrakech but - tweeting from Antarctica, presumably a welcome change from the heat in Washington.