IT HAD to happen and how it has done; we are hearing first warnings from scientists about the danger to the planet posed by global cooling. The latest, theory is that the threat to the ozone layer above the world is being intensified by this long cold winter.
The logic of this is apparently that global warming causes global cooling, which suggests, that we have nothing to worry about.
We have. What we have to worry about is the almost bottomless belief in the ability of scientists to get to the secrets of the universe; and every 18 months or so, scientists at Los Palomos or Berkeley or the National Institute of Atomic Particle Research, Termonfeckin, announce they are close to the full secrets of the universe that they have identified all but two tiny fragmenteens which go in to the making of matter.
Once they mastered those details, they assure us, the secrets of the universe will be completely bared by science. No doubt in that same, certain way in which a year ago they were telling us the threat to mankind was from global warming and now, apparently, they assure us, it is global cooling.
Simple Everyday Facts
Does anybody believe this? Does not everything we learn every day from our simple experience show that virtually nothing in life beyond our personal experience is knowable and comprehensible, and that only the extraordinary vanity of science persuades the soothsayers and alchemists of that black art that they know anything?
What do they know? One single newspaper of last week suggests that our real knowledge of ourselves and of this universe is barely more useful and valid than that of the druids peering up reverentially in the neolithic. That photograph contains a photographic feature about new astronomical photographic techniques.
One of the subjects photographed is the global cluster 47 Tucanae. The caption announces that it contains several million stars, some of which are at least 16 million years old. Another photograph is of cluster NGC 3603, the biggest in our galaxy, containing stars 30 times hotter than our sun.
Apart from teaching us what global warming really can mean, does such stuff not remind us that though we might be aware of these things, we do not and cannot knob them in any useful sense.
No human mind or imagination can embrace the intellectual reality of several million stars, and this in a single cluster in part of our galaxy, with thousands of other galaxies across the universe.
For we are already dwarfed by the moon, numbed by a summer sky. Perhaps the most single haunting sight of my childhood was when Brother Primavesi focused the school telescope from Ratcliffe bell tower and I saw the rings of Saturn and sensed the mysteries of outer space.
Understanding All
Yet 47 Tucanae, we learn, has millions and millions of suns. Logically there must be millions of Saturns. Through that Ratcliffe telescope, poised upon a winter's night, I merely saw a sparrow in a plague of sparrows. The bright lads in the National Institute of Particle Research, Termonfeckin, might take this sort of stuff in their stride.
If they do, it is because they close their minds down from the terrifying vastness of serial galaxies, with their millions of Saturns stretching from one black eternity to another, with somewhere in between - on a speck of dust we call earth - scientists assuring us that they are close to Understanding All.
We understand nothing of our own species, never mind the secrets of 47 Tucanae and its 10 thousand Saturns. The newspaper which tells of it tells us also of the bright lads of the Japanese National Institute for Health, senior management of which was recruited after the war by the Americans from the ranks of the Japanese army medical Unit 731. The NIH is now under attack for peddling in HIV infected blood.
Which is not surprising. Unit 731, operating in Harbin in Manchuria under the guise of a sawmill, used to inject captured Chinese guerrillas, British and Americans with cholera and plague germs. When the "maruta" - the jokey name for the "sawmill's" patients (it means logs) grew ill, they were cut open, without anaesthetic, to see how quickly their organs were deteriorating.
The Soviet Union wanted to execute these doctors, but they were smuggled to safety so that the USA could learn what they knew.
One colleague in the National Institute of Health and who rose to be its director was Ryosuke Marata, who had worked in unit 1644, the human experimentation centre in Nanking.
Another useful veteran of those happy days of the Co Prosperity Era was Masaji Kitano, a frostbite researcher, who used to freeze captives solid and then break off their limbs, and Hideo Futagi, chief of human vivisection in Unit 731.
No trial awaited these men, no cell, no noose; just the dignified celebrity of eminent medical scientists. But old habits die hard, and it now seems that its NIH leaders persuaded the Japanese government 15 years ago to forbid the importation of blood which had been heat treated to kill HIV in order to protect the position of Green Cross, the commercial blood bank founded by the frostbite hero Masaji Kitano, and the vivisectional hero, Ryosuka Marata.
The consequence of this policy was that 2,000 Japanese were HIV infected by tainted blood.
Evil is Banal
This is wickedness on such a scale as to dwarf the immensities of space; the thousands of Saturns strong across the sky like fairy lights are as nothing compared to the man who freezes his patients and then snaps bits off them.
Evil is banal, no doubt, but it does seem to be the only infinite quality we are capable of understanding, but not infinitely.
Oh no, not infinitely.
One of the Bosnian Serb special units of dedicated volunteers deployed at Srebenica, which murdered some 1,200 unarmed Bosnian Muslims within a few hours, was recently arraigned in the Hague. His name is Drazen Erdemovic.
He killed scores, perhaps hundreds, for an ethnically cleansed Serb Bosnian Republic. But that is not the incomprehensible bit. This is. He is a Croat.