Afraid

Now that I've finally retired from full-time employment that required me to arrive at the office 7:00am and work throughout the day to help build a company that actually succeeded, I occasionally suffer through a few minutes (that's all I can stand) of early morning network TV shows. They are, of course, a melange of fake news, COVID fear-mongering (it never stops), and biased reporting, combined with worship of Harry and Meghan, an occasional vapid cooking demo, and other mind-numbing nonsense. But above all, there's the national weather.

Basically all weather is now part of a catastrophist narrative. We're now threatened by (get ready for it) hot, hot days in the summer, drought in the arid parts of the country, forest fires in the forests.  All of it—ABSOLUTELY all of it—is due to climate change or the newly rebranded "climate crisis."

"40 million people will face temperatures approaching 100 degrees!,"  the national weather person intones. "Be sure to stay cool, hydrate, use sun screen ... Experts worry that these temperatures are here to stay because of the climate crisis."

You'd think hot weather in the summer is unusual. It isn't. But now you need to be scared, very scared because it's a harbinger of the coming apocalypse, sorta like COVID was.

Juli Burchill (of the U.K.) comments on this idiocy:

We’re not living in the Gobi desert. There are these things called ‘seasons’ and they change – this one’s called ‘summer’ and it lasts around three months. There’s going to be 10 weeks of clement weather and then comes October, heralding six months of greyer skies and shorter days – this time with the added fun of a Covid revival and eye-watering energy prices. Do we really want to spend our day in the sun running scared, seeking shade like harassed animals? Isn’t it better to keep calm and slap on the aftersun balm than carry on kvetching? But if you must rain on our parade, just look forward to those lovely drizzly autumn days when you can complain about yet another kind of weather to your heart’s content. 

If "raining on our parade" was all catastrophists do, it would be tolerable—a collection of bitter enders wailing into the dark night. Irritating yes, but we must be tolerant of irrational phobias.

But our current national leadership establishes policies based on those phobias that dismiss relevant data, ignore meaningful science, and censor those who suggest alternatives. As a result, the past two years gave us the COVID debacle where lockdown decisions did far more harm than good, where masking was an ineffective debacle, and where children suffered educationally and emotionally for no good reason. 

And now that the "climate crisis" is slowly replacing COVID as the scare tactic du jour, we've gotten environmental policies that have done far more harm than good (think: $5.00 per gallon gas, coming brownouts in some states, and stratospheric heating oil prices this winter).

And here in the free state of FL, it's going to be 91 degrees tomorrow and the next day and the next until summer is over—just as it's been for hundreds of years.

Be afraid, be very afraid.

UPDATE (07/21/2022):

Have you noticed that high temperatures, both in the U.S. and U.K. are all the rage for the climate alarmists' trained hamsters in the mainstream media. After all, these high temps are a harbinger of the coming climate apocalypse. Coincidentally (I'm sure) these context free, unscientific, and hysterical "news" stories acted as a lead in to Joe Biden's recent announcement that he's going to declare a climate emergencies with an emphasis on high temps. 

A wonderfully cynical post by "Bookworm" suggests that "We are being indoctrinated in ways both large and small to end fossil fuels, something that will also end the modern world we know." The high temp hysteria is just one small example. Bookworm writes:

The biggest long view I have is that, without fossil fuel, nothing separates us from the pre-modern era. For 99% of the world’s population, that era was not a pretty Jane Austen movie. Life was short, painful, diseased, filthy dirty, hungry, and either too hot or too cold. Most people didn’t live past 40 and half of children died before hitting 5. There were only four energy sources: Human labor, animal labor, and primitive wind and water energy. (Five sources, I guess if you consider the sun drying laundry on the line.)

It is true that much has changed over the past 300 years, and it's reasonable to argue that we should move slowly and methodically away from fuels that pollute, but do so in a way that does not wreck economies, destroy livelihoods, and create political and societal chaos (think: Sri Lanka).

Bookworm presents the following weather charts for the U.K., one from 2012 and the other from this past week:

 

The difference isn't the temps, they're just about identical. It's the presentation. In 2012, happy sunshine symbols depicted the weather. No cause for alarm, no hysteria, it's hot but that's what summer is about. Today, angry red covers the map—we're all gonna die!!!  Not so subtle manipulation anyone?

UPDATE (07/26/2022):

Record high temperatures!!!!  If you were to believe the narrative, we'll all fry in the coming years. Climate alarmists tell us so and take every opportunity to connect a single 100+ temp reading in July (summers are hot) to the "climate crisis."

The problem is, the actual numbers don't match the rhetoric. The editors of Issues and Insights add a little reality:

The only data that can be trusted, that makes a genuine apples-to-apples comparison, are the measurements from satellites. All other temperature reconstructions require faith in subjective readings of often poorly placed primitive instruments, and compromised tree ring signals.

So, then what do the satellite data tell us? That we just went through “the coolest monthly anomaly in over 10 years, the coolest June in 22 years, and the ninth coolest June in the 44 year satellite record,” says University of Alabama at Huntsville climate scientist Roy Spencer.

They also note that warming is occurring at a rate of 0.13 degrees C per decade since 1979, a little factoid that is conveniently overlooked by the the world's greatest climate scientists, Al Gore and John Kerry, and their trained hamsters in the mainstream media.