a possible introductory paragraph for a story about a globalwarming-sceptic geologist delivered in a monologue

“You can, and no doubt once this discussion has finished, will talk to me all you want about climate change and try ignite a rumble of unease in my stomach. If gorging me on facts about the imminent droughts, tornado’s, melting icecap’s, earthquakes, food shortages and the drying up of the gulf stream gives you a morbid twang of satisfaction then go ahead. If you want you can call me a ‘stoic ignorant refusnik’ when I upturn my palms and ask ‘and?’ in response. (indeed I believe I just saw Janet scribble those very words onto her notepad a minute ago) Because we haven’t ‘scarred the earth’ and we don’t need to ‘protect’ our ‘frail’ and ‘vulnerable’ ecosystem, things are going to pan out naturally. Trust man’s hubris to think that laying our asphalt coat on the earth and encrusting it with houses and cars, that embroidering its surface with coal factories and skyscrapers, allowing pesticides to seep into its babbling brooks and endangering its many species through centuries of hunting has inflicted any permanent damage on it. Just because we’ve killed, cremated and scattered god’s ashes doesn’t mean that nature hasn’t taken up that biblical force.

It’s not this feeble, sensitive edifice, requiring the patient adoration of an eco-conscious 5 foot creature who sees itself as the harbinger of mankind’s restoration to remain intact. Do you honestly think that it needs to do more than shrug to entirely eradicate us? That’ll it’ll even need to yawn to reduce any trace of man’s short dominion to ash, dust and the odd bone? No, the earths not bruised and weakened by our actions but simply napping, tolerating us whilst its alchemy of lava sits at its core awaiting an eruption of primal intensity. Do we truly believe that the homosapien with his posable thumb prised on the nuclear button has a greater right to occupancy than that of the Velociraptor? Well of course we do, and that’s why the extinction of the most majestic breed of creatures to knowingly have inhabited ‘our’ earth is labelled ‘pre’ history. It’s why the palaeontologist is not the same revered intellectual titan as the military historian. I don’t see how devoting endless pages of scrupulous documentation on mans folly is going to profit anyone, so why is prehistoric life marketed predominately as an interesting distraction for children, whilst knowledge of Stalingrad is a..”

he interrupted himself to stop and take a lengthy swig from the glass of water in front of him, swishing the fluid around his cheeks so they inflated like balloons. The attention of the room was what you’d call rapt, with the silence punctured only by a muted sneeze of the man propped up on the wall at the back and then the odd torrent of coughs that bubbled in succession as though acquiring an unstoppable momentum with each phlegm-soaked emission. The conference hall was packed right to the two exits at the back, with the room arranged in a kind of gradient of importance- journalists and advocates towards the front tailing further back to cynics and further back still to those ambivalent to Dr. Werther’s opinions but attracted by the large turnout.