There’s an old jibe about how some people’s minds are like concrete: all mixed up and permanently set. Which we thought of when we read in Heatmap about the supposed dilemma of Microsoft, committed to “sustainability” including “low-carbon building materials” but cranking out data centres at a massive pace. Alas those centres are made of concrete and apparently there is such a thing as “zero-emissions concrete” which costs more and is moreover unavailable, yet it is “a product that must become the standard if we are to stop climate change.” So boo Microsoft and a fat lot of good all their virtue-signalling did them. But the point is, do these people really think if Microsoft made cement out of um, uh, whatever has no emissions the weather would no longer vary? Is “stop climate change” a coherent aspiration, however improbable? What can it possibly mean? No decade warmer than another? Or wetter? In one place or everywhere? Or are they just using random words without caring whether they convey any coherent, identifiable idea?

There is much that we could say about the specifics here and little of it is good. For instance you might think that the enterprise must be hopeless if:

“Last year, the company’s indirect emissions rose 31%, primarily due to the construction of new data centers.”

Also, a phrase like “indirect emissions” ought to be a red flag about measurement techniques, including that if they’re Microsoft’s “indirect” emissions they must be someone else’s direct ones. Possibly including the CO2 we exhale while drafting this item using Word. And we wouldn’t want to double-count, now would we?

Then there’s the remedy:

“The tech giant has signed a memorandum of understanding with Sublime Systems, a Massachusetts-based cement startup, saying that it will buy ‘environmental attribute certificates’ from Sublime’s first commercial cement plants. Microsoft will ‘book’ the environmental attributes – the greenness, for lack of a better word – of Sublime’s cement, and ‘claim’ those attributes in its own emissions accounting.”

It is very hard to think of any real-world thing that you can achieve by purchasing someone else’s attribute certificates, from fitness to romance to military success. What can it all even mean?

Which brings us back to the phrase that stopped us like a set of concrete galoshes. “Stop climate change”. And to the lethal words of George Orwell in Politics and the English Language:

“When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases – bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder – one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy...”

We have raised before the question of what alarmists think would be the ideal level of atmospheric CO2 and global temperature and how they know. And a follow-on: why do they very much like the weather of, say, 1850 or 1450 or a million BC or the Cretaceous? Now we have to add: Do they think that before “climate change” the weather did not change?

If so they are strikingly ignorant of the history of the planet Earth, which has seen dramatic rises and falls in temperature as well as conditions of every sort for reasons ranging from Milankovitch cycles driven by eccentricities in the Earth’s motion to continental drift. But even taking fairly short periods of time, a century or two, in which those factors are not significant, do they think that it never got stormier or less so, wetter or drier, warmer or colder?

If not then to speak of an aspiration to “stop climate change” is gibberish. The only way to salvage it, or try to, would be to pledge to eliminate human influence on weather, or reduce it to an imperceptible level, on the theory that somehow doing so would mean that it only changed in good ways from now on. But again what would such a thing mean?

That there would be roughly the same number of Atlantic hurricanes every season instead of the wide variability observed over… oh dear. What’s this? The last century and a half? That it would always rain the right amount or at least the same amount each year, facilitating the task of farmers who’ve been dealing not just with the unpredictability but with the variability of precipitation since... oh dear. What’s this? The invention of farming.

If we “stop climate change” will it be impossible for the Holocene to wind down and the glaciers to return? Or will it just be impossible to know what it’s meant to mean, or to get people to use words to communicate ideas on this topic?