At least George III waited until he was on the throne to go bonkers. The Prince of Wales has already given an indication of a premature onset – along with the hope that his accession to the eponymous title won’t happen soon.
Prince Charles ascribes the blood-soaked chaos in Syria, and generally in the Middle East to – brace yourself – climate change, “one of the major reasons for this horror.”
The disorder must still be in an early stage, for otherwise HRH would have said ‘the only reason’. But the condition is degenerative, and we have much to look forward to.
It’s hard to keep pace with the runaway train of Charles’s thought, but he does try to support this bizarre statement: “What we’re doing to our environment [creates] greater conflict over scarce resources”.
Our wanton disregard for the environment caused “five or six years of drought” in Syria; the drought caused the 2011 uprising; the uprising caused the civil war; the civil war caused 250,000 deaths; the deaths caused 11 million to run away from home; and the combined effect of all those disasters presumably caused the hundreds of massacres perpetrated by Muslims over the last 20 years (to keep the temporal perspective narrow).
All this is traceable back to anthropogenic climate change, believes our future king, so next time you whip out that aerosol spray, I hope you’ll be suitably ashamed of yourself. The blood of all those Muslims and their victims will be on your head, vicariously at least.
HRH modestly credits himself with saying those same things “twenty-something years ago”, which belies my belief that his condition is still in an early phase. Perhaps it’s only passing from chronic to acute.
This is one of the rare moments when I no longer regret that our royals aren’t allowed to play a bigger role in running the country although, to be fair, Charles couldn’t possibly be worse than Dave.
However, his firm commitment to this madcap idea is worrying. After all, the anthropogenic nature of warm weather is the first discovery in the history of science made not by scientists but by a political body, the UN as it happens.
Much as one has to respect the epic successes this organisation has achieved in its own field (Yugoslavia springs to mind, among many other examples), one has to say that the evidential base of the theory is, to be charitable, weak.
The political base, however, is massive, and the banners of fictitious global warming have drawn all the same people who oppose nuclear energy, shale gas, medical experiments on animals and everything else that can improve and prolong human lives.
However, an attempt to connect the current upsurge in Muslim aggression with this slapdash theory leaves the domain of ill-advised politicking and inability to assess evidence to enter one of a clinical problem.
To realise this, all one has to do is look at the map of the Middle East, where Israel looks like a tiny strip on Syria’s south-western edge. Indeed, the territory of Syria is nine times that of Israel, but this isn’t the point.
The point is that, since Israel is right on Syria’s border, her climate has to be roughly the same. Israel, in other words, must be suffering the same effects of climate change (at least the even more idiotic ‘global warming’ is out of fashion) as those driving so many Syrians and other Muslims to mass migration and mass murder.
Yet none of this is happening. No droughts, no uprisings, no civil wars, no urgent desire to mow down people in Western capitals. The only thing Israel seems to be suffering from is the same Muslim aggression that has been with us for 1,400 years, ever since Mohammed and his jolly friends rode out of the red-hot Arabian sands.
Perhaps HRH should reconsider the whole issue and reroute his train of thought to a track where the danger of hitting intellectual buffers is less imminent. But then his mind seems to have only one track at the moment.
P.S. You can find many such subversive thoughts in my book How the West Was Lost, now available in its second (paperback and electronic), edition.