The benefits of climate change

IF there were such a thing as the Campaign for Biblical Language in Everyday Speech (we could call it Cables), it would surely make some sort of award to the critic who yesterday accused ex-Fifa official Chuck Blazer of "garnering silent wealth unto himself."

I OCCASIONALLY make a list of things gentlemen do not do. A gentleman, left alone with a tea cosy, does not try it on. A gentleman, when using a sink plunger, does not pretend to be a Dalek. And a gentleman, offered the choice at 10am on Monday between the smooth, sophisticated humour of Episodes (BBC2) and the unspeakable grossness of Greg Davies in Man Down (C4) certainly does not switch over to C4. So did you? Me, too. Oh, the shame. One sniffy female reviewer denounced Man Down as "a smutty farce" and no-one can deny that it was rude, crude and infantile. But does any of that matter when you're rolling around the floor in hysterics? We don't have to be gentlemen all the time.

HERE we go again. The geeks of Geneva have fired up the Large Hadron Collider for yet another session of sub-atomic particle smashing, claiming that it will transform our understanding of physics and lead us into the quantum age. There is much stirring talk about pushing back boundaries, revealing dark matter, discovering the building blocks of nature, yadda, yadda. So far Cern, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, has cost our cash-strapped continent at least £10,000 million and has produced not one volt of energy nor fed a single hungry child. Now, it seems to be answering questions that only a few hundred people understand, let alone want answering. Meanwhile here are two questions we can all understand. If there were no Large Hadron Collider, would any of our lives be changed in the slightest degree? And if this collider project is so atom-smashingly important, why did the Americans scrap theirs, more than 20 years ago, with no regrets?

CLIMATE change is taking the place of religion and, like all religions, does not deal in half measures; there is only right and wrong, good and evil, heaven and hell. But real life is shades of grey. Scientists in Africa report that a rise in greenhouse gases has actually increased rainfall south of the Sahara. The droughts are over. The land has blossomed. The people can at last feed themselves. For them (and for how many millions of others?) climate change is a change for the better.

I KNOW little about football and even less about Fifa. But it's not hard to understand why Fifa is revered in some parts of the world. Fifa gives them lots of money. To us in the affluent, oh-so-principled West, handing out dosh stinks of corruption. But across half the world's surface, that is simply how business is done: I want your support, so here's a little present.

AND while we in the developed world may gasp in horror at such practices, let's not forget that the worst financial crisis this planet has ever seen was caused by smart Westerners in expensive suits who would never dream of paying a bribe but siphoned off billions from honest little investors and caused more anguish in a few weeks than Fifa has caused in 100 years. When the Third World looks to the West for inspiration, what sort of example does it see?

"WOMAN sent to jail for noisy sex" (Guardian website headline). Sounds like the best place for it.