The Merchant of Green Death.

New Scientist, 5th February 2011, issue 2798, page 27. Article 'One minute with Lester Brown'.

This is a man banging on about climate change but whose background is in agriculture and economics. He is no more qualified in climate modelling and weather prediction than I am, and I am not.

His argument on the issues facing water supplies are perfectly correct. Taking water from underground aquifers faster than they are replenished will, most definitely, lead to severe problems in the future. That, I agree with absolutely and based on his qualifications in agriculture and economics, I fully accept his timescales for the future problems.

However, this has nothing at all to do with climate change, whether man-made, natural, or due to comet strike or dancing medicine men. The forthcoming water shortages are caused by people pumping water from wells faster than it drains into those wells. The climate is irrelevant.

Nonetheless, he uses this to demand a restructuring of the world economy along his lines and to demand we all (well, not him personally of course) return to mediaeval life for the sake of the climate. He ends with this:

It's about becoming politically active. If there's a coal-fired power station near you, organise to close it down.

They've already tried. The unwashed, uneducated drones who follow the new religion of the Green God have tried to shut down a power station. They will succeed one day.

When they do, all those life-support machines, baby incubators, kidney dialysis, monitoring equipment, in every hospital, will stop working. Just like that. No warning. No backup. They just stop.

In windowless operating theatres where patients lie with some part or other of their innards exposed, the lights will go out and the anaesthetic machinery will stop working. You want to imagine something really horrible? Imagine waking in the dark surrounded by the sound of panicking people and realising your abdomen is open and it hurts.

In every pensioner's home, in every nursery, the heat will go off. Lights too. All security systems will be inoperative, all street lights off, all those CCTV cameras will be dead and it won't take the criminals long to work out what that means.

Even if you have gas central heating, the controller and the pumps are electric. They won't work either.

Try to leave town, and find that the pumps that put petrol in your car are electric. You won't get far.

This is the scenario that the Green God's followers want to bring to reality. They have the full support of Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute.

Science has become a dangerous fascist entity. To Science, we are just statistics, not human beings. If they get their way there will be a cull. Science, like religion, cannot be trusted with politics. They are too convinced of their own Righteousness.

How will they decide who to cull? It would be difficult unless there was some way to collect everyone's DNA and catalogue it. Then, Science can dispassionately decide who is useless.

The irony is, most of those unwashed Green eco-warriors are certain to be on the list.