Sunday, April 11, 2021

April, You Duplicitous Little Minx

Ah, April! You duplicitous little minx you.

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day.
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You're one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
a cloud come over the sunlit arch,
And wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you're two months back in the middle of March.

- Robert Frost, Two Tramps In Mud Time

Thus far spring has been glorious in the Midwest: unseasonably warm as in record-breaking-as-warm-as-summer in some places. Following a bit of rain the past week everything has literally sprung to life; the landscape transformed into an impressionist painting of soft mauves, pinks and green.

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No doubt this early spring streak of warm weather will sprout more gloomy talk from the global warming crowd. The doomsday advocates will speak of forthcoming disasters and lobby for more Green New Deals and greater controls on everyone and everything, as they await their annual rite of spring, Earth Day.

I hope this bit of information doesn’t upset the celebration of their high holy day: it appears that what’s heating the planet, in addition to the sun, isn’t carbon emissions - at least not in the sense Climate Warriors think of them - after all. No sir what appears to be warming the oceans is something far more insidious - which it to say, something they can’t possibly controlled by taxes. It’s not fossil fuels, again, not in the sense they’re used to thinking about them, but rather underwater volcanos?

“The massive mid-ocean ridge system is a continuous range of underwater volcanoes that wraps around the globe like seams on a baseball, stretching nearly 65,000 kilometers (40,390 miles)…The ridge system forms the longest and largest mountain range on Earth, winding its way between the continents.”

What a conundrum.

“More than forty thousand miles of underwater volcanoes – who knows how many are active? – spewing out red-hot magma (as much as 2000 degrees F), and we can’t figure out what is heating our seas?”

I would like to be the first to predict that we will shortly hear squawking from the Climate Advocates not about global warming but rather the coming ice age. After all, the advocates don’t particularly care what’s going to do us in, as long as they’re in charge of it and can tax us for it.

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

Robert Frost, Fire and Ice

 

Iceland-Lava_flow_at_Krafla_1984Iceland Lava Flow at Krafla, 1984

The upside of switching from a warming front to a cold front: we can drill for oil and gas again. Of course it’s going to require much, much higher taxation now that we’ll have to do everything in our power to conserve it for the future of the children.