There has been plenty of discussion here already on COP21. Before we collectively start to naturally tail off our commentary on the annual climate jamboree however I wanted to mark something I consider to be one of the most symbolic and underreported COP21 related events.

Geoff remarked on November 14th that out of respect for the victims of the horrendous events in Paris, we would pause published commentary on COP21. Such considerations did not even seem to enter the mind of Oliver Tickell, the Ecologist’s editor (of all people), who immediately postulated that COP21 may have been the real ISIS target. Worse, he implied that “big oil” may have had a hand in it. Truly nauseating and execrable bilge.

I held back from writing any public blogs for the last few weeks because events in Paris had left me personally both completely distraught and incandescent with rage. Like for so many other people, Paris felt very close to home. A number of family members have lived in France for some time and despite them being many miles from Paris it has been an almost irrational relief to know that they’ve decided to leave the country for good and return to the UK in the coming months. I’ll miss my father’s effusive happiness over finding that there were so many British ex-pats living in the area that they put on a regular ‘Chas and Dave’ night at one of the local pubs.

At the time I would not have been able to write calmly about Tickell’s special brand of offensive and narcissistic drivel, not even just to note it as yet another incredibly damning piece of barrel-scraping by a community of doom-mongers who appear to have left all standards of civilised behaviour and discourse behind years ago, ostensibly freeing themselves from restrictions in order to “save the planet”. Or at least enabling them to virtue-signal incessantly to that effect regardless of the complete absence of any meaningful change in their own habits and lifestyles, never mind that of the global population’s.

On past experience I should not have been surprised that something even worse than Tickell’s irresponsible screed would follow afterwards, but it did. And I think it is important for posterity to mark it and condemn it. So I register here my distress and anger.

Despite the French government understandably calling for a temporary ban on large public gatherings, the climate faithful went ahead with mob rule anyway. Despite the French people already being traumatised by mass indiscriminate murder on their streets, the climate faithful engaged in the spectacle of running police battles on the streets of Paris anyway. Despite the fact that any sober observer can see, the “Green” climate agenda has made huge successful inroads into all of our lives with massive establishment support, the climate faithful engaged in wanton childish destruction to demand more anyway.

The police attempted to downplay the scale of the activism, claiming that it was “just a small number of extremists” at work. They nevertheless carried out 317 arrests. That simply isn’t a tiny number by anyone’s reckoning.

Violence broke out at Place de la Republique where, by the Marianne statue, a makeshift memorial to the Parisian victims of Islamist violence has been maintained since the Charlie Hebdo murders. The threat of a benevolent trace gas is so great, apparently, that the climate faithful felt empowered to utterly desecrate a site dedicated to the memory of people killed by a genuinely immediate and concrete existential threat. They even looted the site for ammunition to throw at the police.

They trampled over everything.

And the rest of the climate faithful who shy away from direct action, said nothing.