By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
In response to an earlier posting showing a picture of me with a camel, George E. Smith asked “Where did you get yourself the horse of a different color? Is it as difficult to ride as it looks? But it does suit you, and is a bit more elegant than floating down on a parachute.” In answer to Mr Smith, here is my account of camel-riding at the Doha Climate Conference in December 2012, with acknowledgements to CFACT.com, where the article, and some of the pictures, first appeared.
The climate camel – going nowhere, uncomfortably
From Monckton of Arabia
Somewhere in the desert, Qatar
A camel, as Winston Churchill used to say, is an animal designed by committee. The climate scare, like a camel, is an animal designed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Trying to ride a camel for the first time can be what Kai Lung would have called “a gravity-removing event”. Under the rustling palm-trees by the balmy shore of the Gulf, I approached my first camel, Aziz, with that intrepid curiosity that built a great Empire.
CFACT fitted a carbon sequestration device to this camel to cut its CO2 emissions.
My lovely wife says animals and children are attracted to me – because I have never grown up. I addressed Aziz with an elegant quatrain from Fitzgerald’s perfect translation of the world’s most charming drinking-song, the Rubaiyat of Umar Khayyam:
Awake! for Morning in the bowl of Night
Has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight –
And lo, the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultan’s turret in a noose of light.
Aziz listened politely, nuzzled me in a friendly way, sniffed my hand thoughtfully, slobbered over it liberally, and then directed a long nostril at my face to get better acquainted. I stroked his neck, wiping the slobber off on it, and he burbled contentedly.
Or so I thought. His handler, with a rapid “chk-chk-chk”, brought him down to his knees and told me to climb on quick. Not quick enough. Before I was halfway into the cloth-covered saddle, Aziz lurched to his feet, flinging me into an elegant and spectacular parabolic trajectory. Upon re-entry, I achieved terminal velocity and crashed firmly into a convenient sand-dune, executing a well-judged judo fall of which my Staff-Sergeant would have been proud. I remembered to go completely limp at the last instant. Sand sprayed in all directions and a new peninsula was created on the Gulf shore.
Umar Khayyam, poet, philosopher, mathematician and astronomer in 11th-century Persia
As I tottered to my feet, dented but unbowed, the two camel-handlers and my three friends were in such fits of unbecoming laughter that I forgot to emulate William the Conqueror by grabbing a fistful of sand and saying, “See, I hold all Araby in my hand” (or at least that part of it that had not been flung into the Gulf by my impact).
Aziz was chk-chked back on to his knees and, this time, I was quicker, leaping into the saddle before we headed skyward.
The object of the exercise was to obtain four camels, affix to their flanks bold placards bearing the words “STOP” “CLIMATE” “HYPE” and the “CFACT” logo of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, which does not believe warmer weather is a bad thing. The idea was to get a suitably atmospheric photograph of our simple message against the backdrop of the verdant palms, the golden sands, the azure sea and the cerulean sky.
This, too, was a gravity-removing exercise, with which my staff-Sergeant would not have been at all impressed. “Your job in the field is to take charge,” he would holler. “If you don’t, somebody else will. Or, worse, nobody else will.”
Among the dunes and the flies, nobody took charge. First we got all four camels on to their knees and stuck the placards on. Then we realized that some placards were on the wrong flank of some of the camels. Then, when we’d gotten all of the placards on the same flank, the message read: “HYPE CLIMATE: STOP CFACT”, which was not at all what we were trying to say.
Meanwhile, back at the Doha conference center, the climate camels were lumbering uncomfortably in all directions and getting nowhere.
The usual factions were maneuvering:
Ø The European tyranny-by-clerk, which needs global warming to be a problem because it can then arrogate yet more centralizing powers to itself, yea, even unto the last fluorescent light-bulb. The EU will sign anything, because the unelected Kommissars who have the sole right to propose its laws do not have to care what the people think, and they want more central power in their hands. They are also advising the envious UN on how to grab all political power by stealth – a treaty here, a treaty there until suddenly democracy has been stolen away forever.
Ø The BRICS bloc – Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – which is not really a bloc at all. All of these emerging nations cannot afford to allow the vicious policies of the anti-development Greens to interfere with their mission to expand the use of fossil fuels to give their people affordable electricity, lift them out of poverty, and thus benefit the environment by stabilizing their populations. They will sign any treaty that does not bind them to limit their emissions.
Ø The fly-specks: The small island states and other economically tiny nations in the undeveloped world. Their ambition is to extract as much money from the wealthy West as they can get.
Ø The unfooled: Canada, Japan, and New Zealand, who have stayed clear of the now-defunct Kyoto Protocol, which will unavoidably expire December 31 because there was no agreement to extend it by October 3, as its own terms require.
Ø The fools: In this category, Australia stands alone. Its absurd carbon dioxide tax is almost 50 times more expensive than letting global warming happen and adapting in a focused way to its consequences.
Ø The United States: Also in a category of its own, Obama’s U.S. is a house deeply divided. The “Democrats” – more like Communists these days – will do whatever it takes to destroy all (such as fossil-fuel corporations) who fund their Republican opponents. Also, they will sign any treaty calculated to wreck the economy of the West. The Republicans, however, will not. No climate treaty will be agreed to by the U.S. Senate, where Senators Inhofe, Hatch, Vitter, and others have spoken out clearly and consistently against climate-extremism.
Today, His Highness Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani, Emir of Qatar, addressed the conference. He announced that Qatar now aims to generate one-sixth of its electrical power by solar power, reducing its dependency upon the oil that makes it – per capita – one of the wealthiest nations on Earth.
Monckton, in the traditional dress presented to him by a prominent Qatari businessman, explains climate change to a baffled reporter from The Times.
The real reason for the Emir’s switch to solar power is economic, not climatological. He provides free electricity to his nation, and every gallon of costly oil that he burns for his people is a gallon he cannot sell. Since he has hundreds of thousands of acres of empty sand available, soaked in sunshine more than 300 days a year, solar power (though more expensive than oil in the short term) may one day prove cheaper than oil.
The Emir also confirmed the hopes expressed by the president of the conference, Abdullah bin Hamad al Attiyah, that a real deal would be struck here in Qatar.
However, the climate camels are all heading in opposite directions, and bucking off their riders. Will there be a deal? Yes, of course there will. There always is. The triumphant announcement of success after the talks go into an extra day is now a routine element in the choreography of these stage-managed farces.
If they really want to make the world laugh, all they have to do is film Monckton of Arabia trying to ride a camel.
Back in the desert, we were still trying to get the camels to behave. We told the handlers to rearrange the camels in the right order, but their English was no better than our Arabic, and anyway we were all shouting conflicting orders at them, and the camels had their own ideas of where they wanted to go. The Three Stooges would have done things better than us.
This pantomime went on for half an hour, until I took a command decision to arrange the camels in single file, sit them down, and then affix the placards to their flanks with duct tape, reading from left to right.
“Never go into the field without duct tape,” Staff would holler. “If it moves, salute it. If it doesn’t move, paint it. If it wobbles, fix it with duct tape.”
The Arabs, however, read from right to left, and one of my friends – a photographer – thought the photo would look more artistic that way around.
Later that millennium, we got the camels and the placards in the right places: “STOP CLIMATE HYPE – CFACT”. We took our money shot and it is now safely on the record for all time:
The moving finger writes and, having writ,
Moves on, nor all thy piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.
Satisfied, we went for an uncomfortable but triumphant ride on the camels in the kindly breeze, with Aziz tossing his head upward from time to time to snatch a mouthful of leaves from a passing palm-tree. But not before I had briefly become one of the first Brits in space.
The medium is the message – er – or something
“If it moves, and it needs to stop, duct tape. If it doesn’t move, and it needs to start, WD-40.”
Looks like the climate camels some climate “scientists” have been riding for a while in Australia are beginning to buck:.http://news.sciencemag.org/funding/2014/05/budget-cuts-lead-lab-closures-australia.
Sadly some legitimate science will also be bucked.
Applies to one and 2 hump camels.
I rode a camel in Cairo to see the great pyramids and the sphinx. I used to ride horses very well, and quite honestly this camel was awful, it gave me fleas or lice too.
I don’t know, I sort of thought that video of Monckton of Brenchley himself demonstrating how PostModern Science hadn’t yet repealed the law of gravity was an iconic moment for skepticism. Just don’t do it again, okay?
A Qatar is a breaking fast ball, and the Sultan of Qatar isn’t from the desert. He is from Panama and he used to close for the Yankees. I hope this helps.
I had a memorable experience of working for some months just a few miles outside Doha in 1969. I had to register as an alcoholic and was able to draw a quite generous supply of alcoholic drinks from a bonded warehouse. We would be visited once a month by unknown persons in a very smart black limousine with dark windows. We would vacate the building, first ensuring there was a bottle of whiskey, glasses and some recent copies of Playboy on the lounge table. When the limo departed we could regain our quarters and carry on. We never had any problems with the authorities. 🙂
Brilliant! WUWT posts have always been good for “what will they think of next” light entertainment; but with this post “…the world’s most viewed climate website” has managed to plumb new depths of triviality and narcissism 🙂
I rode a camel in Tunis and it was the most frightening experience ever.
I read somewhere that the Rubaiyat of Umar Khayyam was an original work by Fitzgerald and not a translation (all the more brilliant for that). Perhaps that was just more Connolley mischief.
Thanks to Lord Monckton for the earlier motorbike news, I was confident that he was a master there too and would avoid the fate of T E Lawrence.
I recall the quote attributed to Winston Churchill as “A camel is a race horse designed by committee.”
My googling found an entertaining extension of it:
“If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, then a consensus forecast is a camel’s behind.” Edgar R. Feidler
I have always thought the quote was an insult to camels and Winston Churchill was far too knowledgeable to have made it. An internet search seems to indicate it originated in Vogue in 1958 and maybe was attributed to Alec Issigonis, the designer of the original Mini. The point is the camel is supremely well designed for the desert and would survive in conditions that no horse could. Aesthetically, the horse may win hands down, but, if form reflects function, the camel does its job very well.
Village Idiot:
Your post at May 31, 2014 at 11:49 pm says in total
I write to disagree.
In my opinion your post is typical of the “triviality and narcissism” displayed by all your posts and does not “plumb new depths”.
Richard
Did you emulate Sir Humphrey by meeting with John Walker and a delegation of Teachers whilst on your sacred mission?!
Camel order is important, indeed, when it comes to filling the cup in the fire of spring.
As for the design, it should have had ‘Here’s looking at you, kid,’ in mind
Village Idiot says:
May 31, 2014 at 11:49 pm
Brilliant! WUWT posts have always been good for “what will they think of next” light entertainment; but with this post “…the world’s most viewed climate website” has managed to plumb new depths of triviality and narcissism 🙂
There is a wise saying, “If you can’t say something constructive keep your mouth shut.”
M’lord, El Brenchley. Salaam. You honour me with your credit. .
The IPCC is clearly a committee designed by a camel………:o)
From Village Idiot on May 31, 2014 at 11:49 pm:
Our passion for scientific exploration in the discovery of truth leads us to travel to all sorts of new depths, as we sure haven’t found Trenberth’s missing heat in the ocean depths.
Although apparently they still whisper at Skeptical-Mythology-Fantasy-Climate how that dragon MUST be there, waiting for it to emerge from the water and scorch this cursed Earth as deserved condemnation for our numerous carbon sins.
It’s laying down there right now, resting its head on MH307, whose plucking from the sky was obviously caused by climate change, as is every other modern disaster.
Personally I think they’ve been watching assorted Godzilla movies while imbibing certain select substances. Which is understandable, given how long they’ve been promoting what they believed in which reality itself showed wasn’t real at all.
For example, look at what the National Center for Atmospheric Research is still trying to sell:
Thankfully NCAR is headquartered in Colorado, which has legalized pot for recreational use. Since after a day of trying to hustle this dreck despite the mounting contrary scientific evidence, their staff members really could benefit from certain select substances to mellow out, forget the dissociation between work and the real world, and for now keep the upcoming psychotic break at bay.
An excellent article M’lord, thoroughly entertaining as it bought a smile. Mirth does not appear to be one of the odd misery-sticks’ preferences, obviously. However, a delightful yarn. Everything can sometimes just be way too serious and we need the occasional merriment now and again. Cheers.
I love camels. They are amazing animals. I rode them many times in India. The more you ride them the easier it gets. The problem with comfort is the typical home made saddle made from bits of wood, blankets and tied together scraps of colored polypropylene rope doesn’t fit your body in a way to allow comfort. The people who rent camels are mostly poor. I’m sure the sheiks have good leather saddles. The camel, which is a ruminant, is also a food source wherever they are common. They taste pretty good. The single humped camel, the dromedary, is as fast as a horse on sand. Maybe faster. On a dromedary you sit tall in the saddle, your head is about 11 feet off the ground. This gives you much greater visibility than on a horse if you are using camels for patrol. We liked camels so much that the wife and I booked a trip to Mongolia several years ago to cross the Gobi desert on camels. These camels were Bactrian double humps. It is a shorter, long haired, stouter type that possibly is the stronger of the two types. You ride between the humps on a Bactrian which causes your junk to be smashed against the front hump as he puts a front foot forward and your tailbone gets smashed against the back hump when he puts his rear foot forward. After 120 miles of this you feel like having badly lost a couple of bar fights a day for a week. Again, cobbled together saddles by poor people. The most disconcerting thing about Gobi camels is their diet. Wild onion! It grows in clumps 6 to 10 inches across all over the place. Your camel can swish his head by one of these clumps without stopping and snatch a half pound of onion top which he thoroughly chews. A cloud of onion vapor surrounds you and the camel. This is followed by about a half hour of onion scented burps and then it is all coughed up for another round of chewing and more onion vapor. It doesn’t end there. Onion farts soon follow. It ends with the remnants dribbling out the rear end, much of it sticking to his hind legs. French onion soup would be the last thing you would want on the menu after a day of this. In Mongolia they also eat camels, but they don’t slaughter them until the end of their useful lives which is about 30 years. Tough meat that has to be slow cooked. Has lots of flavor, though.
Christopher Monckton of Brenchley:
It seems the question you raised in your previous post finds an answer in this one: get him to ride a camel.
It is the measure of a great man that he can make fun of himself.
Christopher closed with, “But not before I had briefly become one of the first Brits in space.”
Glad you decided to come back to Earth.
Village Idiot must be one of those people who vote “don’t know” in opinion polls. A true master of the irrelevant and pointless comment. A bit like this comment really.
This is the ultimate now it does not matter whether there is EVEN warming (AGW OR natural)!!! We have to save the planet anyway from climate change LOL
http://guardianlv.com/2014/05/if-global-warming-is-false-people-should-still-change/
These guys need urgent psychiatric assistance.
stan stendera said on June 1, 2014 at 5:07 am
Obama Skips Self-Deprecation, Lashes Out at Republicans in Vicious WHCA Dinner Monologue
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Noted. Thanks for the tip.
That Guardian column reads as though it were written by a third-grader.
Apparently Climatists have no sense of humor. But we knew that, didn’t we.
Thread winner! Though I will not let it deter me from the marvelous onion. . .
/Mr Lynn
Monckton, This really is brilliant, especially “tyranny-by-clerk.” What a joy it must be to spend time in your company where no matter how bleak the immediate prospect might seem, a really droll time is sure to be had. I do think you would be up to a Jonathan Swift treatment of our times.
Bestiary of Flanders and Swann comes to mind – repopulated with those who currently afflict us.
Cheers, Sir.
A new task, Lord Monckton: attach a sign saying, ‘global cooling already is the new climate change’ on some cats and then herd them around!
Or sheep. I used to herd sheep. They mill around a lot, even more than camels.
The entire Rubaiyat translation by Fitzgerald can be downloaded free from Gutenberg. It is far superior to the translation by Graves, and is most memorable piece of writing.
The only thing Obama has weaponized is stupidity.
Village Idiot says:
May 31, 2014 at 11:49 pm
Brilliant! WUWT posts have always been good for “what will they think of next” light entertainment; but with this post “…the world’s most viewed climate website” has managed to plumb new depths of triviality and narcissism 🙂
============
Stick around, I’m sure there is more to come 🙂
Hilariously brilliant. “Tyranny-by-clerk”; indeed the head of the Soviet Communist Party (and all others, I suspect) was the General Secretary – the major “clerk” in the works. Who else gets to see all the mail and respond to it, set agendas and such? In your professional societies gone bad, look at who occupies a position of this nature, and work to oust him if you care about it.
After seeing that photo, I had to go watch a Henry Cooper video on youtube.
Faboutlaws gets the prize for the funniest comment. It also manages to be informative. Maybe my business empire should extend to a high-quality saddlery business for camels.
Dear M’lord.
On behalf of Australia I should apologise for being alone in “The fools” category.
Rest assured we’ve taken steps to remedy this embarrassing situation and when the new Senate commences on 1st July 2014, sanity should once again prevail.
Well, It seems I have awakened too late.
Simply wonderful, Lord Monckton. A fine caper on your part, and certainly up to the standard of your bail out entry; or does that make it a bail in ??
A new chapter in the folklore of MofB_III .
To bad you didn’t find an unattended open mike, or you could have given us some Persian quatrains right from the sands.
And I’m happy that the answer to my question : “is it difficult , ?” is that it is survivable, even by Nobility
Many thanks Christopher, for a nice entry in the log book.
G
I have a recipe for cooking a camel.
It says: “Same as for a dromedary only you’ll need two pots”
“””””……emsnews says:
June 1, 2014 at 6:22 am
A new task, Lord Monckton: attach a sign saying, ‘global cooling already is the new climate change’ on some cats and then herd them around!
Or sheep. I used to herd sheep. They mill around a lot, even more than camels…….””””
Now watch where you are going with those sheep yarns !
We just about have the world market cornered, at least in Merinos, and Southdowns; well our chums on the big Island, have some Merinos too.
We have about 25 for each citizen; that’s enough to pull the wool over anybody’s eyes.
G
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I think it was Abraham Lincoln who said, “It’s better to be silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”
I think the camel to be a climate skeptic, acting on his belief that what goes up must come down. A perfect match between man and beast me thinks.
I thought Sir Richard Francis Burton translated the Rubaiyat.
Only too happy to present myself as the harmless Idiot, to breathe at least a little bit of life into an otherwise deadly boring and totally misjudged post 🙂
More of M’Ludd Munketons meaninglessly mediocre schoolboy pranks, this time dredged up from the past. Don’t you feel yourselves just slightly exploited?
From Village Idiot on June 1, 2014 at 1:22 pm:
Nothing wrong with feeling slightly exploited afterwards, if you consented to the possibility at the start.
Plus I swear the dog was smiling, she liked to watch.
As well adapted as that dromedary hump is for desert life, it appears that it evolved in an Arctic climate to tide over the winter: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2013NatCo…4E1550R
–according to mid-Pliocene camel remains from Ellesmere Island. Of course the Arctic was a lot warmer back then. –AGF
Oh well, go to Wikipedia for that link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Arctic_camel#cite_note-Rybczynski6-1
Here we go: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v4/n3/full/ncomms2516.html
Village Idiot on June 1, 2014 at 1:22 pm
Only too happy to present myself as the harmless Idiot, to breathe at least a little bit of life into an otherwise deadly boring and totally misjudged post 🙂
More of M’Ludd Munketons meaninglessly mediocre schoolboy pranks, this time dredged up from the past. Don’t you feel yourselves just slightly exploited?
Feeling a twinge of jealousy are we, or mild outrage, at a private individual doing some “exploiting” and not the official publically owned government edifice of CAGW exploitation. Taking advantage of muddle-headed do-goodiness, of the ageing remnants of the obligatory lefty protest of bygone student generations – that is socialist and acceptable, n’est pas?
But to return to your point – about Monckton’ witty memoir about falling off a camel in Doha and bungling a poster protest – well yes, indeed, what can one say but “help help I’m being repressed!”
I rode a camel near the Pyramids years ago. To paraphrase the old joke, we set off a 6pm sharp. Three hours into the journey I checked my watch and it said 6:01pm…
I hear the view of the Earth from space is spectacular. Lord Monckton seemed too busy to notice. Perhaps next time, assuming there is a next time.
Here’s an interesting tidbit: camels and llamas–in spite of what is believed to be several million years of evolutionary isolation–have been cross bred, giving us the…cama:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/49301.stm
No kidding. –AGF
I like the two hump camel with the long hair, I rode one at London Zoo years ago. But they are cold weather camels, maybe they will come back in popularity once the planet cools. LOL
Actually, Australia is desperately trying to dump the carbon tax
Actually, the new (non Labor) government is attempting to remove the much-hated carbon tax even as we blog. Hopefully, a few new senators will come to the party.
AlecM says: June 1, 2014 at 2:38 am
The IPCC is clearly a committee designed by a camel………:o)
Thanks AlecM, you made my day 😉
Ah, yess. I remember my first (and last) camel ride.
‘Twas on a sunny cool day back in the last century, ‘neath the eternal gaze of the Great Pyramids. The maitre des chameaux taps the beast on the shoulder and utters some magic words, then the camel drops down on its knees and you get aboard. One big lurch and you’re up. The motion is unusual.
Then you find out the secret. You’d eventually like to get down, but the guy’s got the stick and you don’t. He knows the words and you don’t, and even if you did, the camel won’t listen to you. Suddenly the boss understands neither English nor hand signals. He does understand the Egyptian 10 pound note you’re waving at him, and then you’re back on the ground and 10 pounds lighter and wiser.
Love the Third World.
I do think the AGW are now amazed their theories (??) are getting frail in the light of reality and real scientific consensus. All making excuses. As far as the American EPA cutting 30% from coal electricity power plants, they can do this by switching to gas or black coal (Assuming they use brown coal for fueling them? Black coal I would imagine is more expensive. I don’t know folks, the world seems to be seeing $$$$ all the time, increasing the costs more than reducing them.
Mike yes it was ‘bacshees’ all the time for me, ‘my camel sick’ etc. We were on a tour of Cairo and the tour organizer wearing a fez, paid the camel train. I rode horses and quite honestly how these Arabs chose and rode these beasts, that spit at you and can gum you, have bloody fleas and lice, I much prefer a nice English cob to ride. This was in the early 60s, and the British were not exactly popular as we wouldn’t pay for the Aswan dam project, and just before the Suiz crisis, and Nasser taking over the Suiz canal.