Well, the Weather Outside is Frightful

OPINION — For years I’ve been poking fun at the Global Warming crowd, because they claim human activity has such a profound impact on the long-term climate on earth that we’re ruining the environment. My position has always been that cyclic warming and cooling trends occur naturally, and have been doing that for thousands of years, and human impact is so small as to be infinitesimal. Actually, that’s my official position. My unofficial position is lying down, as a rule.

Now, I’ll admit that irritating the Global Warming bunch is a lot of fun, and that’s incentive enough to do it, but I also have valid reasons for refraining from pulling my hair and running around in circles every time some Climate Expert predicts the imminent demise of all life on the planet. If you cry wolf enough times, people eventually quit running to your rescue. And the Chicken Littles have cried wolf a lot.

For example, if you were born prior to the Carter administration, you might recall the Big Scare about the Hole in the Ozone that was discovered during the late 1970s. This was right after the Big Scare over Global Cooling during the mid 1970s, when we were all about to freeze into human popsicles. The Global Cooling crowd couldn’t get anyone to listen, on account of people were too busy sweating during August to worry about buying parkas, so they switched over to Global Warming. That didn’t really take off, either, due to frozen Easter eggs in Texas, so they relabeled the movement as Climate Change. It’s ambiguous enough to be adaptable to anything, and alarming enough to incite panic among the gullible. Perfect.

But the Big Scare over the Hole in the Ozone was the major issue there for a while. Ozone is a gas made from three oxygen atoms, and there’s a layer of it all around Earth, about 12 to 18 miles high. It absorbs ultraviolet light, and basically keeps everyone on the planet from having to wear SPF 597 all the time, even when they’re asleep in their fallout bunkers at night. Fallout shelters were a thing too, for a while, during the 1970s.

Anyway, an atmospheric scientist named Richard Farman first discovered there was a Hole in the Ozone Layer over Antarctica, big enough to drive the Enterprise through. Farman did some checking, thinking the Hole was caused by supersonic aircraft and the space shuttle, but no. Turns out your dad was using too much Right Guard deodorant, and your mom was getting that beehive do to stand up with too much White Rain hairspray. So said Paul Crutzen, Mario Molina, and F. Sherwood Rowland. They got the Nobel Prize for that. Which is why the Nobel Prize for Junk Science is now an aerosol can glued to a Ouija board.

Well, the scientific community was in a tizzy, running around like a one-legged dog trying to bury a bone on a frozen sandpile. There were rumors (unfounded) of sheep blinded by UV rays, and the scientists at the South Pole were supposed to die horrible deaths. Which probably would have been a blessing. Have you seen the South Pole?

But nobody could figure out what to do about the Hole, so they thought we were all going to die. The problem was that, after a while, the Hole started getting smaller. They now think it will be all closed up by 2050, or when the Cleveland Browns win the Super Bowl, whichever comes later.

Even so, we needed something to worry about, which is why the eggheads came up with Global Cooling, and then Global Warming, and then Godzilla, and then Climate Change. Not sure I have the order right. The only problem is that the weather won’t cooperate. The weather that’s getting warmer all the time actually gets cooler sometimes. Bummer.

And that’s why penguins are dying by the bucketloads, in Antarctica. I know because Todd Martin sent me the story. Thousands of penguin chicks are starving to death, because the sea ice down there is unusually thick, and their parents are having to go farther to find food. Out of 18,000 pairs of Adelie penguins that live in East Antarctica, only two chicks survived the 2017 spring breeding season. Four years ago none survived. I hate it when that happens.

Now, you might think, as I did, that there was too much sea ice in Antarctica because it was colder than normal down there. If so, you obviously haven’t been paying attention. No, the ‘scientists’ who are studying the penguins say there’s too much ice because (I promise I did not make this up) the seas are getting warmer. Really.

So now we have a new phenomenon – warmer water causes MORE ice to form, not less. And you thought science was hard when you were in seventh grade.

But it really doesn’t matter what the water temperature is, anyway, since the Australia Bureau of Meteorology is on the case. No matter what the thermometer says, those guys just report whatever they want us to hear. They were caught in August of 2014 reporting warmer temps than their weather stations recorded, and then they did it again. Their reports support Global Warming, but the truth supports Grab Your Jacket. Because you can’t create a good panic if there’s nothing to panic about.

I think there’s a hole in the Oh, No! Zone . . .