One is reassured that one lives in profound times when much is
made of the heat of summer. In duller days, when a person makes the
observation that it is hot outside — and when the observation is
made in June, July, or August — it can be assumed that profundity
is not the aim. Instead, the observer is seen to be engaging in
small talk, and very small talk at that.
In our day, however, it is the wisest members of society who
make much of summer’s heat, and as we know the wise don’t waste
time with empty chatter. To ask “Is it hot enough for you?” is to
reveal a mind fully attuned to the greatest issue of the day, short
of Islamist attempts to eradicate Democracy: That issue is the
slow, deliberate roasting of humanity.
Not only is warming an article of faith, but it is further
insisted that Western consumer societies are to blame. We have
brought this dangerously renegade condition upon the world and
unless we fix things soon vast calamities will ensue. These
messages are transmitted with such certitude and alarm that many of
us are convinced we are being confronted by fanatics. Hellfire,
we’re sure of it. To these people, every degree of temperature is
like every foot of elevation to one afraid of heights — cause for
additional fear. Because it tends to be hot between June and
August, there will be no end to their panting.
How does a reasonable person cope?
There are a few reasonable responses to fanatics, besides
hanging them. The first is mockery. What? You say it’s 85 degrees
in mid-June. What’s next? Darkness at midnight? The other approach,
favored these days, is to exhibit understanding. It can be easily
enough observed that the afflicted suffer from “control issues” —
a maniacal need to feel that they are either in control of the
climate, or can bring the climate back around to an Edenic state
with the proper public policies, such as mandatory carpooling and
refusing to use weed whackers and other trivial applications of the
internal combustion engine.
But there’s nothing better than letting these people have it
with a bucket of cold water, as has Andrew Kenny in the current
Spectator (London version). Mr. Kenny’s essay is very much
worth reading in the original (it is available at the
Spectator’s
website), but in short he says the global warming scare is
ginned up and what we really have to worry about is the next Ice
Age. Mr. Kenny’s message is so pleasantly heretical you’d figure
he’d be a hero among the “question authority” crowd. That doesn’t
yet seem to be the case. Maybe that crowd doesn’t really mean what
it says.
Mr. Kenny, however, is convincing enough.
Like all good heretics, Mr. Kenny begins by forcing the faithful
to eat their own words, which includes reprinting a paragraph from
Time magazine, circa 1994: “The ice age cometh? Last
week’s big chill was a reminder that the Earth’s climate can change
at any time…. The last one [ice age] ended 10,000 years ago; the
next one — for there will be a next one — could start tens of
thousands of years from now. Or tens of years. Or it may have
already started.”
One hates to agree too much with that journal of muscular
hysteria, yet Kenny makes a convincing case that Time was
right — at least back then. “The last ice age ended about 10,000
years ago,” says Mr. Kenny. “Temperatures rose to the ‘Holocene
Maximum’ of about 5,000 years ago when it was about 3°F higher
than now, dropped in the time of Christ, and then rose to the
‘Mediaeval Climate Optimum’ of about 600 ad to 1100 ad, when
temperatures were about 2°F higher than now. This was a golden
age for northern European agriculture and led to the rise of Viking
civilization. Greenland, now a frozen wasteland, was then a
habitable Viking colony. There were vineyards in the south of
England. Then temperatures dropped to ‘The Little Ice Age’ in the
1600s, when the Thames froze over. And they have been rising slowly
ever since, although they are still much lower than 1,000 years
ago. We are now living in a rather cool period.”
Some of us down here in the near-tropics were thinking the very
same thing the other night, when the weatherman suggested putting
on flannel pajamas as nighttime temperatures were expected to dip
into the 50s. In mid-June, no less. One should never generalize
from isolated incidents, of course, yet as the cool air blew in
through the window, Mr. Kenny’s final prediction also picked up a
little steam: “For the last two million years, but not before, the
Northern Hemisphere has gone through a regular cycle of ice ages:
90,000 years with ice; 10,000 years without. The last ice age ended
10,000 years ago. Our time is up.”
It’s nice to know we may freeze instead of roast, and there’s
always the possibility we’ll be pulverized by a killer asteroid.
It’s really starting to look like none of us is getting off this
planet alive. So, how ‘bout them Redskins?
