Apes, Wolves, Permian Extinction Rebellion And The Net Zero Cliff Edge Facing The Man-Made Global Warming Narrative

This is going to be a rambling, seemingly disjointed post, but hopefully it will tie itself together by the finish.

This is a rock I picked up during my recent peregrinations in Scotland.

A particularly hard, durable sandstone used in many beautiful buildings in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dumfries. It formed almost 300 million years ago when what is now Scotland formed part of a vast sand dune desert (much like the Namib today) at the heart of the supercontinent of Pangaea, just north of the equator. Pangaea broke up eventually and the fragments of that once huge continent drifted north to form Eurasia and North America. To put that timescale into context, human beings evolved from primitive apes in around 2-3 million years, modern humans only appeared in Africa around 300,000 years ago and they didn’t start to colonise the globe until at the earliest 200,000 years ago. The dinosaurs weren’t even around when that rock formed. They appeared many millions of years later. The dominant vertebrate life form on land were synapsids, so called ‘mammal-like reptiles’ which supposedly looked like a cross between a lizard and a dog.

Talking of dogs, they evolved from wolves in even less time than the blink of an eye during which modern humans evolved from apes. 40,000 years is all it took. Some claim even less, that dogs were domesticated from wolves in as little as 15,000 years but I believe our alliance with wolves greatly predates farming, settlements and ‘civilisation’ as we know it, stretching back into the last Ice Age when hunter-gatherer humans out of Africa were competing with Neanderthals on the Eurasian continent. In fact I believe it may even be possible that it was not modern humans who first formed alliances with wolves, but Neanderthals, that humans learned from Neanderthals and just did it better, or that maybe it was naturalised Neanderthals in human communities who first showed humans how to live advantageously with friendly wolves - who actually domesticated us, not the other way round, as commonly believed. It’s a fact that Neanderthals interbred with humans, so there was communication between the two species. But that’s another story, another narrative.

Humans love their narratives. They value them above virtually everything else - barring sex.

Whilst on the road, I re-read ‘The Philosopher and the Wolf’ by Mark Rowlands. It’s an account of his days and years spent with his beloved wolf-dog Brenin, from pup to old age, plus some philosophy and general observations on life and what it means (or doesn’t mean) to be human. Rowlands says:

If I wanted a one-sentence definition of human beings, this would do: humans are the animals that believe the stories they tell about themselves. Humans are credulous animals.

From credulity there is often but a short step to hostility [presumably towards those less credulous or who believe different narratives].

So much for humans. Where do wolves fit in?

. . . . . . . in every story told by apes, we shall also find a wolf. And the wolf tells us - this is its function in the story - that the values of the ape are crass and worthless. It tells us what is most important in life is never a matter of calculation. It reminds us what is of real value cannot be quantified or traded. It reminds us that sometimes we must do what is right though the heavens fall.

I hope you might glimpse the wolf here in this short narrative. If not, then here’s Mason, who’s not a wolf but a German Shepherd Dog, but he looks the business and I don’t think he has many ape thoughts or schemes rattling around inside that beautiful head of his:

Of late, there is very little wolf to be found in our human stories and we are all the poorer for it, as Mark points out:

We are all of us I think, more ape than wolf. In many of us, the wolf has been almost completely expunged from the narrative of our lives. But it is at our peril that we allow the wolf to die. In the end the ape’s schemes will come to nothing; its cleverness will betray you and its simian luck will run out. Then you will find what is most important in life.

The human race is at that juncture. We believed our narratives so ardently, so passionately, so aggressively, that our luck has run out and is running out, chased away by the spooks of wars, financial crises, deadly pandemics and deadly human-caused global environmental catastrophes, whilst we ourselves are falling prey to actual Spooks who want to limit our lives and freedoms and imprison us all within our very own digital cells, where we won’t hear the howling of the wolf or the crashing of the waves, or the screaming of the wind, or the gentle falling of autumn leaves. To save Nature and to save humanity supposedly, they would tear us asunder from Nature and our wild, inner selves in order to transform us into controllable and predictable digitised mechanoid humans - that and kill us of course, as well as our beloved companion animals and farm animals even, who would remind us that there is more to life than ape stories.

But let’s flip back 300 million years ago to the beginning of the geological period known as the Permian, when Scotland was part of Pangaea and was more like the Namib Desert than the cool, damp, mist shrouded valleys and snow-capped wild highlands of today. The Permian ended abruptly (over a total timescale of maybe 100,000 years) around 250 million years ago - and so did most of life on earth, in what is the worst known extinction event in geological history, more catastrophic even than the event which wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. 96% of marine species died, 70% of land species disappeared and virtually all of the trees growing on the planet died too. Now that is a proper extinction, not your airy-fairy, terribly scary, hypothetical man-made sixth mass extinction conjured up by the likes of mad Roger Hallam and his End Days Extinction Rebellion outfit who glue themselves to roads, scale bridges, climb on top of London tubes and generally make a nuisance of themselves to protest at the lack of urgency in addressing the supposed existential environmental crisis which faces humanity and the planet - as evidenced apparently by some melting ice, a few inches sea level rise, some very moderate global warming over the last 150 years and some recent bad weather - and really very nice weather! That’s nothing compared to what happened 250 million years ago. The Permian Extinction was a truly life-on-earth destroying catastrophic natural event; Hallam’s ‘extinction crisis’ and that of the climate alarmist ‘scientific’ community is a silly ape narrative which many have been conned into believing. We need to counter that silly Simian storyline which has become so pervasive that it threatens to actually destroy Western civilisation, fragile as it is. We need a Permian Extinction Rebellion - featuring wolves of course - to counter the hysterical scare-mongering of Extinction Rebellion and the soup-throwing nutters at Just Stop Oil, as well as the tenured ‘experts’ telling us the end of the world is nigh unless we repent our carbon sins.

Why talk of wolves though? Because they have become such an integral part of our lives via domesticated dogs. Because maybe, just maybe, neither wolves, nor humans would be around today if it were not for the mass Permian extinction. On land, few animals survived but one synapsid did and it exploited the niche created by the lack of competitors. That synapsid was Lystrosaurus. It too was a rather odd cross between a mammal and a lizard - we might call it a wolf-lizard and it came to dominate life on land following the Permian extinction.

This creature is the probable ancient ancestor of modern day humans and wolves - and our dogs. The truly catastrophic Permian extinction event thus gave rise to the apes, who became the humans and also the wolves, who befriended the humans and evolved into dogs. The real Permian extinction allowed for the evolution of the fantasy global human-caused ‘climate crisis’ narrative invented by the human apes one idle afternoon when they had nothing better to do, who now kid themselves that, in less than a hundred years they have become a force greater than Nature itself and are capable of wiping out all life on planet earth by boiling and acidifying the oceans and by hacking the atmosphere and its weather with trace carbon dioxide emitted by burning hydrocarbons. We even gave this geological microsecond a name: we called it the Anthropocene or more recently ‘the era of global boiling’.

We apes are indeed so clever, so scheming, so inventive, so arrogant and so utterly deluded that we think we can achieve in a microsecond what Nature, even at its most fearsome, powerful and awe-inspiring, took a geological second (100,000 years) to do 250 million years ago. Nobody embodies the scheming ape more than David Attenborough. This neo Malthusian old goat spent his life building a (well earned) reputation as a naturalist and popular wildlife commentator. The BBC helped him do it. Together, they now spend their days knowingly and calculatedly propagating the false ape narrative of an existential ‘climate crisis’ in order to further a political agenda which has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with saving wildlife or the environment and everything to do with culling and controlling the human species by winding back the clock on 200 years of technological and industrial progress.

But some wily apes no longer believe the narrative spun by some other scheming apes. They’ve cottoned on to Attenborough and the BBC and their latest scheming, dishonest attempt to portray the natural world and its inhabitants as suffering from the pain inflicted by man-made climate change. The Telegraph, in response to Planet Earth III, recently shown on the BBC says:

BBC Planet Earth III left viewers in tears on Sunday evening with scenes of soggy flamingo chicks struggling to survive storm surges and turtle hatchlings battling sea level rises.

“The planet has changed beyond recognition,” warned Sir David Attenborough gravely, “Transformed by a powerful force. Us.”

Yet despite the gloomy tone set by the programme, many of the animals featured in the episode are faring surprisingly well, thanks to global conservation efforts.

This comment by Peter Kettle really sums up the growing public response to this latest blatant propaganda exercise. Some apes are no longer credulous.

Attenborough has gone from a ‘national treasure’ to a ‘scheming old man’. Why? Because the social, environmental, technological and economic catastrophe which is Net Zero has woken up many to the scam of man-made climate change and its supposed mitigation. Also, with Covid and the mass coerced and mandated vaccinations, we learned not to trust our governments or their crisis narratives. The catastrophic global warming/extreme weather narrative was already failing under the weight of its own absurdities; Net Zero is the cliff edge over which it will tumble and then we credulous apes will have to look for a brand new and compelling story in which to believe. But let’s hope there is a wolf in there somewhere. Not the Big Bad Wolf of old, but the more friendly wolf of ancient days which came to sit by our fire and share our food and in return offer its keen eyes, ears and nose and its four fleeting paws to enhance our security and chances of survival in a hostile ice age climate.