Lawrence Hall, HSG
August is Unusually
Hot – Someone Must be Punished for It
The
gentleness of heaven is on the Sea:
Listen!
The mighty Being is awake
And
doth with his eternal motion make
A
sound like thunder – everlastingly.
-Wordsworth, “It is a beauteous Evening, calm, and
free”
Having barely graduated from high school (I think the
quarter-credit for driver’s education put me over the top) I am certainly no
climatologist, meteorologist, or vulgar Swedish child, but I am not persuaded
that the concept of man-made climate change obtains.
Certainly the climate itself changes. Visitors to America’s
high desert mountains often find fossils of sea-creatures from the long-ago
when much of the western states were the bottom of the sea. There were land
bridges between Asia and the Americas and between Europe and Britain which
disappeared beneath rising oceans (gasp!) in times when human technology was
pretty much limited to people throwing rocks at each other.
The Roman colonization of the then-warmer Britain included
instituting the cultivation of grapevines for making wine, a practice which
continued until the global cooling of the Little Ice Age of the 15th-18th
centuries froze the vines out of sustainability in the island. The economic
activities of Celts, Romans, Danes, Geats, Angles, Saxons, Frisians, or Gauls
had no influence on the ever-changing weather.
Thus it is illogical and even presumptuous to conclude that
someone driving to work in a vehicle powered by an internal-combustion is
capable of unnaturally altering the climate of the planet.
We cannot even predict the weather accurately, much less
control it.
This is a season of unusual but not unprecedented heat,
drought, flooding, tropical storms, and, along the Mexico-USA border, an
earthquake to accompany the flooding. To blame any of these aspects of weather and
climate on any individual or group is a burn-the-witch mentality unworthy of adults
who can read, write, do sums, and tie their shoelaces.
Personally, I blame all this rough weather on fluoride,
cod liver oil, and Catholic space lasers but, hey, that’s just me.
Weather happens without regard for our activities or techno-superstitions.
At least that’s what The Voices keep telling me.
-30-
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