It's weather, not climate ...

Photo: View from my window 1/1/18 - -25C

And Rex Murphy adds: "you dummies".

• "Any variety of weather whatsoever can be traced, if you keep the grants flowing and the contradictions unexamined, to the One Holy Underlying Theory of All Weather"

When it's freezing cold outside, I sometimes say, "Thank God for Global Warming". To me, it's a joke, but it usually receives confused looks from people who remember only what was said yesterday on the TV Weather Network and therefore "believe" only in the more ethereal "Climate Change".

As Murphy says: 'We are fortunate to have such guardians, to direct us away from our senses, and beckon us back on the road to faith."

If I didn't know better I'd think he got the "faith" idea from my Oct. 24 post on climate "belief".

At any rate, in 2012, The Daily Mail wasn't aware of the concept of "Climate Change" and transitioned straight from "Global Warming" to something called "Cycle 25". Suddenly the thing to fear (which in religion is synonymous with belief) is an imminent, though "mini", Ice Age.

Shades of the 1970's when the cover of Time predicted the exact same thing. Even David Suzuki agreed, though he wouldn't like that to be remembered now, especially after making all that money doing infomercials where he invaded people's home to yank out their lightbulbs (YouTube) and second fridges (YouTube) in a sincere effort to cut down on the "carbon" pollution that causes "global warming".

The Daily Mail shows a chart that does not include anything like Al Gore's warming hockey stick which, not surprisingly, took a lot of flack.

• “In 2003 Professor McKitrick teamed with a Canadian engineer, Steve McIntyre, in attempting to replicate the chart and finally debunked it as statistical nonsense.  They revealed how the chart was derived from "collation errors, unjustified truncation or extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, incorrect principal component calculations, geographical mislocations and other serious defects" -- substantially affecting the temperature index.”

Consequently, in Gore's brave new sequel, the hockey stick has been given a new role:

• In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore showed a version of the famous 'hockey-stick' curve that my co-authors and I published in the late 1990s (M. E. Mann et al. Geophys. Res. Lett. 26, 759–762; 1999), revealing a dramatic spike in temperature over the past century. There is a 'hockey stick' in the new film, but it charts instead the remarkable global growth in renewable energy over the past decade. Climate change is accelerating; so too is our ability to tackle it. There are reasons for cautious optimism.

Naturally, there are those who have hastened to muddy the waters even further:
Science Says: Why there's a big chill in a warmer world

• Super cold air is normally locked up in the Arctic in the polar vortex , which is a gigantic circular weather pattern around the North Pole. A strong polar vortex keeps that cold air hemmed in.
• “Then when it weakens, it causes like a dam to burst” ...

So, not to worry; the world is still warming; it's just that, like a zoo animal, some cold has accidentally escaped its lockup.

Will the real scientists please stand up? No matter how few and impecunious?

There's a website called "Climatism". Granted, it's pretty right-wing but, wow, it provides a name for this peculiar type of belief which, like all religions, alters its theme occasionally in order to keep up with the times - the basic premise remaining solid, however: that humans must not be allowed to see or think for themselves, lest all control over humanity be lost.

Speaking of the '70's: There was a radio debate that I was eager to hear because it was between two complete opposites: Malcolm Muggeridge and Charles Templeton. But, part way into it, I fell into what seemed like a bizarre state of cognitive dissonance.

At first I thought that each was playing at arguing the opposite side of their own well-known stances. But no; it turned out that the old reprobate, Muggeridge, had become a God-fearing Christian (no doubt because his sins had found him out) while the Evangelist Templeton had become so terribly upset with God for letting so much of humanity suffer starvation and death, that he stopped believing and became agnostic.

Toward the end of his life, however, Termpleton is said to have acknowledged with tears in his eyes that he missed Jesus.

I know how he felt, having myself been brainwashed in Pentecostalism. The gospel music, particularly, was extremely important to that end. Like national anthems, like romantic music, songs about loving Jesus (and now, "not just loving Jesus, but being IN love with Jesus" YouTube) can stir up a kind of yearning. A feeling of belonging, of being on the right side of things, despite the inherent warning that one step out of line can wreak vengeance from Jesus' father.

Here's an excellent example (YouTube) of how people's emotions are played upon in a gospel service. Come to think of it, politicians do the same kind of thing. See how Lady Gaga plays the audience on behalf of Hillary Clinton. The message is that both Jesus and Hillary gave their lives for you and have the power to save and protect YOU personally!

Emotion is the powerful bait that attracts millions of downtrodden people to the deceptive world of Christian fundamentalism and corrupt leaders -- and also to the belief in and fear of "climate change".

Personally, I'm all for returning to the days when we hung our own thermometers just outside the window, and there was no hype, no dire predictions, no hell-fires or damnation, just a temperature we could trust (and nobody to tell us what it "feels like"), and that simply gave us an idea of what to wear when we went outside.

Sometimes we had a warm winter, sometimes a rainy one, sometimes a cold, snowy one, like now. Sometimes we had cool summers, rainy summers, blistering hot summers, floods and forest fires, sometimes a scary hurricane. And that's not climate change; that's weather!

More Fascinating Reading:

Environment Canada: Top Weather Events of the 20th Century

A thoroughly fascinating Novel: The Third Temptation by Charles Templeton
"A Truth So Shocking It Could Ruin TV's Best-Loved Evangelist"

Weatherwar 101