P.T. Barnum's Pandemonium Climate Show

As can be expected, since we've had some flooding, a hurricane of sorts, and a multiple day heat wave, the Climate Change hysterics have reached a fevered pitch.  This happens like worms appearing on the sidewalk after a dousing rain.  Whenever something that smacks of 'heat wave' happens, we're suddenly hit with multiple stories and articles that appear about how this is it, this proves it, case closed, we're all going to die.

Of course the problem is that this catastrophic heat wave was, in the end, not so bad.  Oh, there were some places I'm sure a record was broken.  When you call for a heat wave covering 40% of the country, there will probably be some places that break records.  Most that I've found, however, didn't.

Each time a story broke about a particular town or city, I would rush to see if that particular day was a record breaker where the story was being reported.  At least in the cases I checked, it wasn't.  Sometimes it was close.  A few times the records were set in the given area within the last 20 years.  But the ones I checked were not records themselves on the day of the story.

It was worse in our neck of the woods.  We were supposed to have multiple days in the high 90s, with adjusted heat indexes being well into the 100s.  The problem?  Only two days made it to the mid 90s.  The rest of the 'heat wave' was at 90 or 91 degrees.  Still hot, don't get me wrong.  But nothing close to record breaking.  In fact, the two days it made it into the mid-90s were far from records.  On one day, the record was 101 degrees about a decade ago.  The other was 105 degrees back in the 1940s.

Despite the fact that this has been book-ended by relatively mild temperatures and a much cooler than normal summer, the local media has treated it as if we're now living on the sun side of the planet Mercury.  Just yesterday morning they had a segment about how the warming climate is impacting our health in central Ohio.  Just what year they're talking about I don't know.   In fact, the 'heat wave' was only made bad because we weren't ready for it.  Most of the summer has been rather mild to cool compared to most summers, so going into even the low 90s seemed stiflingly hot.   The big news for us has been the saturation of rain at the start of the growing season, mixed with milder than normal temperatures.

A couple days ago, one of the meteorologists actually made me laugh.  He kept saying that we've been  in the 90s since July 13!  Wow!  A whole week in the middle of summer in the 90s.  The average temperature at this time of the year is mid 80s, with highs in the 70s not uncommon, and highs in the 90s not uncommon either.  And yet he kept saying, with each weather report, how we've been in the 90s for almost a week!  As if that was the clincher for proving this was the heat wave of heat waves.

That, my friends, is called a sales pitch.  People often throw back at me that I don't know the science so shut up.  That is true.  I know nothing about the science.  I know nothing about automobiles either, beyond how to drive them.  But I can tell a sales pitch when I see one.  Same here.  It's like the salesman insisting that the rattling sound is no big deal, the car actually runs well.

Again, I'm not denying that the obsession with STEM for the past couple centuries has had a detrimental impact on many things, including the environment.  That we keep insisting on obsessing with STEM to the exclusion of any other disciplines suggests lesson not learned.  Nonetheless, I also can't muster enough credulity not to see that the modern Global Warming hysteria is a molehill of science upon which a mountain range of political and ideological agendas has been piled.