The North Briton

Narrator: slow and low, film trailer voice knocked off cheaply for mid-morning television. Lingering shots of infant climate scientists stranded on ice flows. Audible needy gurgles. Adult climate scientists, labcoats yellowed and dirty, return anguished glances over laptop screens at their young from adjacent ice flows separated by thin shafts of freezing water.

“Around the world, climate scientist populations are in crisis. Faced with rising temperatures in their research centre habitats caused by the increasing friction of exchanges with human journalists and the overloading of server fans by human hackers, some of the world’s most respected climate scientists are starting to die out. In their ideal state they survive by hunting funding agreements from governments and chicken soup from the Klix vending machine, their handsome white coats protecting them from the ravages of the weather and critics of their work.

Cut to shot of climate scientists huddling together around a fire of burning data-sets

“They live together, nurturing their young and data closely and carefully in small packs known as ‘peer groups’. The lives of the climate scientist species revolves around these peer groups, and this is the reason why their population is under threat. As the ground upon which they stand shrinks away they struggle to maintain their groups, and justify their findings. Soon, there may be nothing left for them to stand on at all. And when there is nothing left to stand on, there are no grants or vending machines left for them to hunt, and they can no longer feed their young or their climate models.

Closeup of climate scientist lethargically licking own labcoat

“We at Project Veryfuckingthinice ask you to pledge just two pounds a month today to sponsor a climate scientist. While this will not return his life to normal, it will get his labcoat laundered and keep him in soup enough to do a few peer-reviews here and there, and provide him and his species a chance of survival. In return for your generous pledge you will receive a photo of your sponsored scientist, a letter, and an unused tree ring data-set to hide under your sofa and cherish. So please, give just two pounds a month, or whatever you can afford, to ensure that these most noble and beautiful of creatures survive into the next decade and beyond. They urgently need your help.

“Your children will thank you.”

Cut to green type on white background: Project Veryfuckingthinice, a division of Greenpeace. www.veryfuckingthinice.com. Final shot of exhausted climate scientist, limbs heavy, looking forlornly into camera before floating out of shot.

Still knee-deep in CRU climate gossip. Every spare minute of my otherwise uncharacteristically relaxing weekend (wander into town, buy paper, lunch, overpriced jumper) was spent trying to keep up with developments as hundreds of people tore their way through thousands of emails like puppies through underwear (for those of you who have been living under a blog for the last few, it started roughly here). Even the increasingly in-flightish FT offered no sanctuary, with a profile of ten “top” climate scientists. Number two on the list? Why Tim Lenton of course, who works a few doors down from everyone’s new favourite emailers at University of East Anglia. It’s a smaller scene than the arts scene, this one. 

And speaking of the arts scene, the climate-themed weekend started innocently and fun enough: David Thompson’s piece read over friday morning coffee on Cape Farewell, a peer-reviewed, Arts Council-funded expedition of mainly art blowhards to the Arctic to expel various gasses on the subject of you-know-what for a few days. Notable gasses included Jarvis Cocker’s learned observation that an iceberg “basically pisses on” all of art; Marcus Brigstocke, on the trip simply because he is the closest a live human has ever been to being a gas, and a man who bravely dedicates his music—human-beatboxing, the CO2 emissions of which are measurable in parts per million per MC—to the cause of global warming. Less notable and more predictable (than Marcus Brigstocke, an achievement worth an arts council grant alone) was Francesca Galeazzi, with her “performance/action/intervention” of opening an actual canister of carbon dioxide gas. Reports from the site suggest Galeazzi countered initial hostility to her action among the small audience by making everyone a sodastream. At least she didn’t waste more of our atmosphere by talking, you say. We should be so lucky. 

The fun continues.