And If They Like The Weather So Much, They Can Go To Hell

 

Dateline: Friday, June 25

I've complained about heat before. It's what I do. The only reason people think of me as even-tempered is that it's not usually that hot. That's been changing fast. Scientists are reluctant to pin any one weather event on global warming because they're trained to be careful in their conclusions, but we all know the truth. We're looking at an existential bollixing. And we are both the bollixers and the bollixees.

Today I am filling bird baths and looking out at my bird friends Studley and DooDah and Dickens and Peanut Dave the scrub jay with anticipatory dread on their behalf, and envy that they are, for the moment, oblivious. There's a forecast out for this weekend for a heat wave so unprecedented that the actual precedents are cowering under the porch and peeing themselves. This never was funny, and it's not now.

This Monday, in gentle Portland, Oregon, a modest and temperate jewel of a city on a major river within sight of actual glaciers, it is currently predicted to reach 118 degrees. And it will dip all the way down to 82 at night. Up till now you could count our nighttime temperatures above 70--for all time--on one hand. So unless the nearest glacier slides right off the mountain and into our bedroom, we're screwed.

As regular readers know, I do not have, or believe in, air conditioning, and intend to survive using my prehistoric caveman skills, refined in the sodden swamps of northern Virginia. I do not intend to fire up a box that sucks up more coal power. That's how we got here.

But I'm beside myself, which is really bad, because both of me are too warm.

It's only in the nineties today, but I peek out of my closed curtains and think about asteroids. Isn't it a blessing that no one saw that monster of extinction coming, 66 million years ago? Just chomp chomp chomp like any other day, and then suddenly a blinding light and powdered dinosaurs everywhere.

But here and now, we know it's coming, we know we caused it, we know what to do about it, and we spend our days talking about trannies in the bathroom and the freedom to infect each other. We've known for over a hundred years. We were warned urgently forty years ago. Al Gore pleaded with us twenty years ago and the Libertarian/Republican conspiracy of doom responded by instructing Americans to mock him. They were not about to let anyone interfere with the lucrative rape of the planet.

Every one of them should have to answer, really answer, one simple question: What's your plan, Skippy? They do not have a plan. For anything. Anything except keeping power and money. They are criminals in the first degree and should be treated as such. Mitch McConnell and every one of the sons-of-mitches, the whole soulless lot of them, should be removed from society before they do any more harm, and punished appropriately. I'd suggest they be roasted at the stake, if there was some way to make that take a few years.

To Con A Sewer

London: A sewage worker has become an unlikely hero after taking three weeks to defeat a toxic 15-tonne ball of congealed fat the size of a bus that came close to turning parts of the London borough of Kingston upon Thames into a cesspit.

The fatberg, that enormous mass of congealed fat and paper products that recently threatened to overwhelm London's sewer system, was not the first of its kind, nor, many say, will it be the last, or largest. As long as thirty years ago there were some that had warned about the eventuality of the fatberg. Theirs were lonely voices crying in the wilderness, but for the most part they went unheard, dismissed as cranks and worse. Only now are people beginning to pay attention; but not enough attention, some fear, and probably not in time.

"We've been predicting this," said Dr. Xavier Draneau of the Institute for Sewer Alarmism, shaking his head, "but even now, not enough people are taking this threat seriously."

Draneau, speaking at the Senate Select Subcommittee on Poop Outcomes, pointed out that the fatberg itself seemed like enough of an anomaly that it was hard to get people to put two and two together. "That's human nature. It's one thing to read about a fatberg accumulating below street level and out of sight of all but a small contingent of sewer workers, and it's quite another to imagine spontaneous geysers of poop spurting out of your own toilet for eternity. The trouble is, faced with such a dire scenario, the average person refuses to imagine it will affect him personally. And thus, politically, it's a hard sell."

"It" is the complete ban of the sale of Wet Wipes. Wet wipes and similar convenient personal hygiene enhancement products are believed by 98% of the world's sewer scientists to be the culprit in most of the serious sewer blockage. Their use has expanded exponentially from a few isolated customers with inflamed tissue issues to a much broader segment of society demanding ever higher standards of cleanliness. The sewer scientists pin the blame squarely on the powerful Wet Wipes industry and its successful advertising campaign to persuade the public of the natural wretchedness of its collective anus. The soothing nature of the product has quickly transformed it in the public eye from a luxury to an entitlement. Youngsters raised on Wet Wipes cannot imagine a world in which they never existed.

Industry spokesman Jess Crammit insisted its product was not to blame, citing, as evidence, an email purportedly leaked from a sewer scientist's private account in which he referred to Wet Wipes users in a mocking tone. Observers of Congress agree that an outright ban has little traction in the Senate, and members of the House were all seen leaving the chamber with gift bags of Wet Wipes and perforated rolls of $100 bills. A whisper campaign on the internet insists that the government has plans in place to mobilize a crack team of Wipes-Source inspectors. In the face of an impasse, sewer activist Duke Conaway says he can sense the beginnings of what he hopes is a massive movement. In lieu of action on the legislative front, he says, there must be a new education effort to advise the population of the Wet Wipes threat. House leaders have indicated no objections as long as no public monies are expended.

Sit-ins are planned.

"One of the problems," Conaway said, "is that the Wet Wipe industry has succeeded in being able to advertise their product as 'flushable.' We're very concerned about that."

Mr. Crammit countered that the product is, indeed, flushable. But "flushable," says Conaway, "is not a precise legal term. My three-year-old son thinks overcoats are flushable. That doesn't make it a good idea. Just because you can flush something doesn't mean you should flush something. There's a real disconnect in the public mind between the use of a product advertised as flushable and the catastrophic state of our sewer system. We're living in a flushable society," he went on, his voice straining higher, "where as long as something goes away where we can't see it, we don't have to worry about it. And now," he said, beginning to whine in earnest, "thanks to the proposed Wet Wipes Protection Act, we can't even get them to take 'flushable' off the label."

"Nanny nanny boo boo," explained Mr. Crammit.

Attention flicked to the side as a man lumbered up to the microphone and began to speak in a sludgy, deliberate, and yet oddly cheerful cadence. "There's still time if we just switched to single-ply," Al Gore said. Go to hell, America said, rolling all its eyes.

You Can Call Me Al

The trouble with roaming around the internet while humming a little tune and not paying attention is that sometimes you end up in a sketchy neighborhood. It's like if you're trying to stay close to the cute guy at the party and then he goes out in the parking lot and shoots up with all his friends. So there I was, hopping from one blog to another, and all of a sudden there are all these scathing comments about Al Gore. One woman even wrote that it made her sick just to look at him. Poor Al. There was a time, first time he ran for president, that I thought he was really very handsome. He kind of bloated up and lost his eyebrows after that, but the older I get the more forgiving I am, especially about those two items.

But it was pretty clear that the animosity toward Al Gore in that neighborhood was pretty general, and pretty vehement, and it puzzled me at first. I mean, it's not like he made us go to war or took all our money or anything. I finally realized that people don't like Al Gore because they don't like to be scolded, and they imagine he's scolding them. I always thought he kept things pretty calm and civil, considering he is yelling fire in a crowded theater. And we're in a very, very crowded theater. And the theater is on fire. I kind of picture him walking up on the stage and waving his hand a little and saying "yoo-hoo." More plaintive than scolding, really. And all these people in the theater are peeling off their sweaters and fanning themselves and yelling down in front because all they want to do is see the show.

Most of your former presidents and vice-presidents pop off and write books and give speeches and make a ton of money, with some notable exceptions, but Al Gore, instead, is running around saying "yoo-hoo, we're on fire." Ordinarily you'd expect people to appreciate the warning, but all they get out of it is that Al Gore would like them to spend more for gasoline, and that makes him an asshole in their book.

Well, when we're considering whether the road we're on leads to extinction or endless prosperity--and we should be considering things like that--there are some good ways to weigh the evidence even without delving into the nitty-gritty scientific details. We can apply common sense, if we can remember where we left it. We can examine motives. Why would a man of means spend his retirement years trying to make gasoline more expensive? Is it just because he's mean? Does that really make sense?

And the scientists. Why would 99% of the world's climatologists be in agreement about the peril of man-caused climate change? Did they all get together in a secret climatologist bunker and say "I know! Let's make some shit up and see if we can get everyone to pee their pants?" Why would they do that? Meanwhile, there is a little posse of scientists who take a contrary view, but they have really big megaphones. Who's buying the megaphones? Is there something in it for them? Does their profit depend on the status quo?

It's not that scientists are always right. But the nature of scientific inquiry, as opposed to commerce, is that it is subject to rigorous peer review, and sometimes a strong consensus develops. Just because the media like to condense, misrepresent, and highlight odd science news such as "Effects of Rodent Porn on Despondent Voles" doesn't mean science as a whole is not a serious enterprise. At least, we should not reject their findings out of hand in favor of stuff that cycles through our email inbox, even if it comes with lots of capital letters and exclamation points.

Proper use of a car

We can also apply common sense to the very notion of climate change. We can hope that we aren't in trouble because we've been operating the same way all our lives, forgetting that that is a very tiny amount of time, or we can step back and take a broader view. There are seven billion of us and most of us have a ridiculous amount of power. We can go all the way around the world in a matter of hours. We can turn night into day. We can climb in a little pod and zip all over the landscape without even breathing hard. For thousands of years, people have been drying their clothes in the sun and wind, but now we bake our laundry dry and don't know what to do if we can't. We didn't get this power for free. We burned up tens of millions of years of stored carbon energy to get it, in just a few years, and our atmosphere is affected by it. Of course it is.

I guess I'm a scold too. But what's my motive? Am I some kind of ascetic who thinks we shouldn't have it easy? Hell no. Believe me, I love this shit. I can walk fifteen feet from my front door and sit down in a comfy chair in a heated vehicle listening to music and be strolling on the beach in an hour and a half. I can do this because we are pulling gobs of antique energy right out of the ground, and

there's only so much of it, and you know what? I'm totally willing to run it all out and leave nothing for our grandchildren, leaving them no worse off than our great-grandparents, but not if it means we're frying the place. I've got more consideration for them than that, and also it will suck for the salamanders.

Just this week we read that Obama's latest anti-pollution plan is being opposed because it might add a few pennies per gallon to the price of gas. If we can't see anything past the price of gas, we're like children asking Daddy for a baby elephant. Go ahead and throw a tizzy if you want to, but if Daddy's smart he's going to take the long view, and he's seeing endless elephant shit and a stomped house down the road. Whining about the elephant is childish, and it might be time to put away childish things.

Yoo-hoo.

A Brief History Of Air

In the beginning, about four and a half billion years ago, the earth was very hot, but at least it wasn't humid. The atmosphere, such as it was, contained hydrogen and helium, elements that were so tiny they kept floating off. Nearly a half-billion years later, the crust had finally begun to sturdy up, so the molten bits had to blow their way through it via volcanoes. This produced carbon dioxide, steam and ammonia but no free oxygen. It was not hospitable to life, and I believe it. I visited my fourth-grade teacher's apartment once, and it smelled like ammonia, and I thought I was going to die.

The carbon dioxide dissolved in the new oceans, which set the world up with a big wad of carbon, the atom of life. There was just a huge bunch of carbon in there, none of it aspiring to become humans at the time. Then as now, we were more or less unthinkable.

About a billion years later, there were all sorts of life-forms, microbes that produced free oxygen out of the carbon dioxide. They got off to a slow start; you know how it is when you're just starting a project and you're in the dithering phase. But by about 2.7 billion years ago, we had what you could call a proper oxygen atmosphere. This was known as the Oxygen Catastrophe, because most of the things zipping about at the time found oxygen poisonous. You see, it's all a matter of perspective. Some of us like to think that the world as it is currently constituted was made for us, but they have it all backwards. If it weren't just this way, we wouldn't be here, and if it changes much, we won't be, no matter who loves us. But I digress.

Thanks to plate tectonics, our continents began doing the bumper-car bop all over the globe. Mountains wrinkled up. A molten rift in the middle of the ocean pushed the continents apart like it was a speculum. There was a huge shift of carbon to land-based forms. In the Carboniferous Period, forests towered and ferns fronded and swamps proliferated, jammed with plants. Talk about your humidity. There were more plants than the world has ever seen, before or since. All this sent oxygen into the air in enormous quantities, leading directly to the pinnacle of creation, the age of giant salamanders, and we've been declining ever since.

On numerous occasions the planet clogged up with ice, even--at one point--being completely covered in the stuff, more ice than the world has ever seen, before or since. Various things factored in. Panama, for instance, not only bogged down shipping traffic until we sliced it open, but changed the flow of the oceans and ushered in a new ice age. It was just one thing after another. By the time people showed up, we were squeezed into a relatively small area because of the massive ice sheets. An apartment in Manhattan, for example, was completely out of the question. We wandered around and whacked the random mastodon and more or less fit in with the scheme of things, and then about a month ago--or 11,000 years, it works out about the same, geologically speaking--the ice retreated. Well, boy howdy. Party time!

We were having some fun now. First we burned up all the forests that were hanging onto most of our carbon dioxide. That gave us some cool stuff, cities and roads and big-box stores and gigantic deserts and whatnot. Ask any infant slapping her hand in the strained carrots--it's fun to have an impact. Then someone discovered all that plant material that had been buried in the Carboniferous Period, and now the  ceiling's coated with strained carrots.

People started sucking it all out and burning it up and some people made money, more money than the world has ever seen, before or since. And the atmosphere started changing again, faster than ever before.

Some other people started getting whiny about it, but they're the kind of people who never get invited to parties. The people who made all the money got together and listened to Al Gore, and they knew something had to be done, so they made up some stuff about him and mocked him for it. Then we got a new President who looked like he might want to try something, too. He got started with some baby steps, and then the people who made all the money got together and told everybody he was a Muslim alien, because they aren't allowed to say "colored guy" anymore, and that was that.

The End. No, really.

Legendary Hotness

Climate science is very complicated. There are reams of data to collect and analyze about a multiplicity of systems interconnected in an infinite number of ways. Throw in feedback loops and the whole enterprise seems almost impossibly complex. It's serious business. How is the average person expected to make sense of it all? It's simple, with the Peter-Meter. Earlier last year, when a couple of British scientists were discovered talking smack in their emails, the very foundation of climate science took a big hit. But neither scientist was caught diddling the pool boy, so we were unable to come to any conclusions.

Fortunately, now we've got much more information to go on. Al "Call me Al" Gore has been rumored to have engaged the services of a massage therapist here in Portland who had more legitimacy than he was counting on, and before you could say "lock box," a convenient hand of truth was shoved down the groin of mendacity. Mr. Gore reportedly thought the Northwest Passage was open and had his mighty vessel all ready to break through, but it was not to be.

At first, many of us were inclined to discount this story, putting it down to the legendary hotness of Portland women, but as the tale unfolded, it became clear we have all been taken for a ride. Mr. Gore allegedly attempted to remove the straps of her camisole, revealing the underpinnings of the global warming hoax. Then he flang the woman onto a bed and launched himself on top of her with a thwomp and a wobble, and that, ladies and gentlemen--that is the sound of glaciers growing, of seas retreating, of hurricanes relaxing to swizzle-stick velocities. It's over, folks. There's no need to panic anymore, no need to soldier through the mountains of research, and best of all, no need to change a thing.

Senator James Inhofe has said that all along, of course. Senator Inhofe, who has irrelevantly siphoned off tankers of oil industry cash, nailed global warming as a hoax a long time ago. So we will have to take him at his word, at least until he bangs the maid.

Oh, if only Copernicus had been revealed to have a wide stance in the bathroom, we'd already have that sun back revolving around us, just the way God set it up.