Updated 18.00 GMT

The top of the main ITN news bulletin last evening was taken up with a ten-minute, blood-curdling feature on the cataclysms to come, anytime now, through Climate Change. It was predicated on a report released yesterday in Paris which is said to be the most detailed study ever made of the problem.

This got me thinking about the nature of change and how much of it is illusory.

Take digital TV, for example. With analogue technology, only four or five television channels can be transmitted by the incoming signal. With digital, 100 or more can arrive at your set-top box. How does that happen?

DigTV has a sharp computer at the transmitter end which analyses every pixel screened before a refresh. Only those pixels which are changing are sent to the receiver. In analogue systems, the whole screen is refreshed every time — hence the difference in channel numbers.

Imagine we had such a computer analysing every moment of real life and outputting to us what’s really changing and what’s not. It would make an immense difference for the better in all our lives.

Politicians would have no excuse for spending our money in truckloads on supposed modernization projects. Business leaders would not be able to sell us “breakthrough” technology that’s just a rehash of what went before. Teachers would be lost for reasons to change core curriculums on the pretext of social change, much of which derives from opinion rather than necessity.

In that situation, the world would be a far less frenetic and alarming place.

On the other side of the coin, fundamentalists of all kinds, who cling to ancient texts and forms of words as if their lives depended on it, would be reassured that the world was not so dangerous or insulting after all. We can all go with gradual change on a step by step basis. It’s the madhouse rush that spooks us.

Most real change occurs in cycles, some rapid, some slower, many long term and most returning to base at the end of every cycle. Human intervention probably just changes the baseline a bit. We are an integral part of Nature, after all, and its most conscious part.

If you pointed a time-lapse camera at the Rockies or the Alps for ten million years, taking one frame every year, the resulting film would show mountains moving like water — in fact, they would probably be indistinguishable from what we know as the sea. As the philosopher Heraclitus said, everything is composed of water.

Back in the 16th century, the northern hemisphere went through a “Little Ice Age” (see below). Every winter the Thames would freeze over in London. Paintings of the period show people ice skating on the river. Today, that’s unthinkable, but it happened. There has always been climate change, even before motor vehicles and industrialization.

Western Europe experienced a general cooling of the climate between the years 1150 and 1460 and a very cold climate between 1560 and 1850 that brought dire consequences to its peoples. The colder weather impacted agriculture, health, economics, social strife, emigration, and even art and literature. Increased glaciation and storms also had a devastating affect on those that lived near glaciers and the sea.

Is today’s change due to human depredation on the planet, as the changelings would have us believe?

Look at the psychology of many of them. They mainly follow the new religion of Scientism, the fundamentalism of the egghead. Every dot and comma of Darwin is their text. There is no alternative. Exceptions can never be admitted. This is a strict faith by any measure, a counter-culture to what we think of as Faith. Only the narrow band of materialism is “true”. All else are brain episodes involving random microcurrents.

Like all people who think they’re totally right about everything, they are natural-born totalitarians, brooking no substitutes, no other worldviews. They have analogue minds down which only a few channels can ever enter. Everything must always be changed all at once.

Have you noticed how we are suddenly being demonized for getting on an aeroplane, even though aircraft only account for 2% of global warming according to the know-alls who control our minds? We each have been alloted something called a “carbon footprint” which demands we plant trees to “offset” almost everything we do. Where does the average person plant trees? In the park? They wouldn’t last very long in any park I know.

If they could only stand back and watch the world through the screen of a discriminating computer that separated real change from the illusory, they would be in for a shock.

But then that word “discrimination” would not be permitted in their lexicon except to describe what they see as evil. By that I mean, anything that allows them to behave in an obsessive, hysterical, neurotric, going-on-psychotic way and force that behaviour on the rest of us. Will we never learn to avoid certain types of behaviour pattern when it comes to making critical decisions?

So, yes, there certainly is climate change, and who can doubt that our pollution counts for some of it. But a single volcanic eruption can make entire summers disappear for years, and a major asteroid strike can have an even more devastating effect on life.

We should clean up our act for the very simple reason that a non-polluted planet is a better place to live than one with smoke in the air. Nobody really knows what’s going on in the atmosphere until they understand its long-term cyclical movements and how these relate to other cycles, including those of our own making. We really do need that discriminating computer.

A period of calm reflection is required now. The frantic scientific changelings should be asked to shut up.