Twenty-ten has arrived at a cracking pace. It has brought with it a sombre reminder not to take things—and people—for granted.  A few days ago I skyped Patrick Moore to confirm the dates of my visit in March, and was astonished to hear that he had just had a spell in ICU. He’d developed a nasty leg infection, and at his age and state of health, it was definitely life-threatening. We nearly lost him! It was a timely wake-up call to me that “the paths of glory lead but to the grave,” and that I have been richly blessed by the friendship of wonderful people like Patrick Moore. I am now doubly looking forward to my trip to Farthings.

On the personal front, the pace has not let up. After the painful rigours of an admittedly beneficial peer-review process, my paper “Anomalous redshift data and the myth of cosmological distance” has at long last been published in The Journal of Cosmology. This is in essence the same paper that was rejected by arXiv, and is the first I have had published as sole author in a peer-reviewed mainstream journal. It’s a definite milestone for me, and I await comments and reactions from the wide world.

My book The Static Universe – Exploding the Myth of Cosmic Expansion (TSU for short) has also been on a peer-review psychotherapy session in the form of a publisher who takes the standards maintained by the books he publishes very seriously.  Roy Keys, CEO of Apeiron, is himself a graduate scientist and personally undertook the editing of TSU. I’ve likened the process to an artist who submits a work of love to an art gallery for exhibition, only to see the director take out an indelible felt-tip pen and draw a moustache on his “Weeping Madonna”. I must admit though, that properly qualified editing does produce a better product, and Roy always made sure that his editorial changes were diplomatically brought to bear.  TSU is now about 80 pages shorter, with 3 less illustrations (Roy politely informed me that it was improper to put photos of myself in my own book. Gosh I’m a mampara…). As with The Virtue of Heresy, I learnt a great deal about the craft of book writing and the rigours of publication, so hopefully my current project, Stephen Hawking Smoked My Socks, will roll out more smoothly and more professionally. I’ll get it right one day!

I find myself drawn more and more into the maelstrom of the man-made climate change debate. This was not my intention because I really had enough on my plate trying to wean some eminent cosmologists off psychedelic drugs—a nearly impossible task, I must say—but lately I have seen the distinct parallel between Big Bang Theory and Anthropogenic Global Warming theory. Both theories gained popularity with the masses not because they were understood or even because of the science involved, but because it was what they wanted to believe. In both scenarios, the spin was created by personalities who were charismatic public speakers, men who could take the emotive thread and knit an enormous comfort blanket for unsuspecting citizens. In the 18^th century, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799) put it in a nutshell: “A man cannot strongly enough ask of Heaven: if it wants to let him discover something, may it be something that makes a bang. It will resound into eternity.”     
I do have aircon in my home, but don't like to use it continuously. I suppose that subliminally, I'm embracing the warmth as we start an irreversible slide into the headwaters of a looming Ice Age. Not that I'm worried about it. It's out of my hands. In this world as it is, there are far more pressing issues I would say. Like the Great Global Warming Swindle, for instance. From a sociological point of view, it is rich ground for contemplation. I didn't want to get involved, but I have to; my social conscience won't let me ignore the greatest scam—by orders of magnitude—ever perpetrated. When one looks at the sheer scale of the deception, it blows the mind—it's now a multi-trillion dollar burglary, feeding without mercy on those scraps of decency that let Homo sapiens feel guilty about environmental hygiene and the way that we prey on and decimate other species. Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Dr Rajendra Pachauri has already pocketed (personally) millions of dollars, and he's only just started. The head of this bloated fish is indeed rotten.
What's the good news? The light at the end of the tunnel for me is that when climategate is eventually exposed, and we sheepishly admit that we've been horrendously duped, and we've guillotined whoever we've caught, perhaps broader society will have insight enough to the corruptions of power and greed, and the horrifying social tumours growing out of propaganda, to see that essentially, it is science and education that are corrupted. The walls of mathematical sophistry are all but impenetrable, and the $13,000,000,000 underground redoubt called the Large Hadron Collider is safe haven for those toying with the personal consequences of owning the Theory of Everything. "Playing God" is the ultimate fascination for man, and I use the gender term advisedly. It is utterly shameful that the unrepentant patriarch in the male of our species reduces us to this. Al Gore could never, ever have been a woman.
Outside the birds have woken, and the day beckons promisingly. I think that my emerging book "Stephen Hawking Smoked My Socks" is going to be a deeply passionate expression of my environmental sadness. Perhaps we can forgive each other, eventually, but I fear that war is the usual panacea for a smoking soul. The Carbon Diaries are written in blood, and Gore's surname is suddenly sickeningly prophetic.

Someone asked me to express my philosophy on climate change in a few words. Here it is in a single paragraph:

“My argument is that terrestrial climate is dynamic, and has been changing cyclically for the Earth's entire lifetime. Climate change exists and is natural. Climate and energy on Earth are products of the Sun by such an overwhelming margin as to make human influence vanishingly trivial. Al Gore lied about that and has formulated huge self-serving propaganda in order to benefit personally. We should divert the funds earmarked (uselessly) for climate engineering by carbon tax to proper, meaningful environmental hygiene, social responsibility, and protection of those creatures over which we have been granted dominion. Human beings are legitimate citizens of Earth, and have as much right to be here as monkeys. All species use their given abilities as they best see fit. However, due to an absence of natural predators and good wars, human population pressure exceeds the ability of the environment to sustain itself. There are too many people, too many monkeys, too many jellyfish, and too few leopards, and way too few objective scientists. We need to get rid of some of the excess, usually taken to mean someone else, not ourselves. I'd start with Al Gore, then Osama bin Laden, then Robert Mugabe, then Julius Malema, then this freaking monkey that keeps busting my gutters and telephone line.”

You’ve all seen An Inconvenient Truth. Now watch the rebuttal and make up your minds on the evidence presented: The Great Global Warming Swindle (8 episodes of ~10min each) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SiB868VEFc

Email Hilton Ratcliffe at hilton@hiltonratcliffe.com.