There’s a little shop down a side-street in the Scottish town of Stirling whose window blinds are perpetually drawn. If its being there suggests it has something to sell, locals have yet to discover what that might be. Some have reported hearing voices from behind its locked door, and, occasionally, music from a lonely violin.
All this was revealed to me by a Glaswegian who, for reasons not relevant here, I had always considered with a degree of suspicion. And, I have since only verified parts of what he said. The first, that there is indeed a town in central Scotland called Stirling; second, that it is home to a mysterious shop; and third, that said shop is leased by members of the local Flat Earth Society.
Quite why they would need a shop is a question to which there appears no satisfactory answer, despite the best efforts of the more inquisitive – that is to say, bored – among the local townsfolk. It is something, I confess, that has perplexed me ever since hearing about it.
That there exists a local chapter of the Flat Earth Society in rural Scotland I find less surprising. I was once cornered by one of its adherents on a flight from Port Elizabeth to Johannesburg. It was an experience that had the twin effect of making a short trip feel apparently endless and revealing that nowhere is safe from revisionists and snake oil merchants.
“See you around”, I said as we parted. He looked annoyed, and I can’t say I blamed him. It was a poor joke.
Now, the reason I’m telling you this is, in the first instance, to up the word count on this blog. In the second, it’s a half decent segue into some interactions I had on social media following our insert on Climate Change.
I had, a week earlier, travelled to a town in the far north of Sweden called Abisko to examine the impact of global warming on the Permafrost. It’s a layer of frozen ground beneath the surface which, since around the last Ice Age, has stored huge volumes of plant and animal matter. Trouble is, it’s starting to thaw and, as it does, a complex process involving hungry microbes releases warming gasses into the atmosphere.
The trip, during which I interviewed highly qualified researchers who are by most people’s definition anything but alarmist, left me in little doubt as to the scale of the crisis humanity is facing. But, it appears from some of the responses I received to an innocuous post on the subject, that others remain unconvinced.
The argument, if you’ll allow me to paraphrase, goes something like this: the changes we’re witnessing are either non-existent or cyclical because we’re too inconsequential to possibly have an impact on a planet on which we only occupy 10% of the 30% of the surface constituted by land. Or, something like that.
It was an unsurprising response: the views of the naysayers are predictable if more than a little infuriating; the well-worn tropes of people with “all you can eat” data and too much time on their hands.
There were other, shall we say, more imaginative rejections of man-made Climate Change. One contributor claimed it had all been manufactured to boost the sales of certain “products”. In what would become known as the Ambre Solaire Conspiracy, I imagined an industrial sun-screen complex in cahoots with pliable researchers bent on global domination; hordes of salesmen equipped with card-machines and factor 50 swooping on the indoctrinated masses.
I sensed an imminent quote from Donald Trump, so I blocked him.
In truth, it’s clear from the social media responses that most people understand the gravity of our predicament. And, that being the case, it’s easy to dismiss the misguided rantings of the extremists who think being deliberately contrary is a noble attribute. It’s a desperate pursuit of iconoclasm in which climate merely provides the vehicle by which to get there. It could just as well be the moon landings or, as the people of Stirling know all too well, the shape of the Earth. But, to repeat my response on Twitter, if only they’d tear themselves away from Google, put on a pair of hardy trousers and go out into the big, wide world to see for themselves. What they’d discover is a planet in trouble, and a body of scientists and researchers who wish the Climate Change denialists were right.