LITTLE ROCK — Just when it looked like global warming acolytes had the long, hot summer they could sink their thermometers into, facts got stuck into their political machinery.
No question it was a superheated, dry summer. I read that corn and soybean production both were down an average of about 10 percent due to intense heat across most of America. The federal government declared nearly 1,600 counties in 32 states (including our Arkansas) to be disaster areas as the drought became the worst since the 1950s.
Jonathan Overpeck of the University of Arizona told a wire service that this kind of heat wave represented just what he and his global-warming colleagues had been warning about. “This is what global warming looks like at the regional or personal level,” he’s quoted as saying.
The New York Times, New Yorker and others who decided to invest their credibility into the politicized global-warming agenda faulted human involvement for the heat wave.
But then Steve Goreham, author of The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania and director of the Climate Science Coalition of America, decided to gather facts to reveal just where this long, hot summer ranked. Surely there had to have been numerous records set for high temperatures across the heartland between May and September.
Nope. Not a single state set a record for high temperatures. Goreham reports that while the thermometer did climb to a sweltering 111 degrees in Little Rock one day, that was well below the record high of 120 set in 1936. Denver topped out at 105 degrees in June. But that also was well below the record of 114 set in 1933 and again in 1954.
Hmmm-the 1930s, eh? I can’t help but wonder how climate alarmists explain the much hotter and drier climate of the Dust Bowl being caused by CO2 emissions when cars had barely started to appear on the planet.
Goreham said only one state’s high-temperature record has been broken in the last 15 years, six summers back in Fort Pierre, S.D. High temperature records for 23 states date back to the 1930s, during worst-ever U.S. droughts in the dust bowl. In addition, two-thirds of the states’ heat records were set before 1960, which sure leaves me (and many others) wondering how the most recent decade was proclaimed “the warmest ever.”
I also find myself wondering why Goreham had the inclination to dig out this information and report it to the American people rather than one of the so-called mainstream-media organizations.
Oh wait, I may know exactly why! Because these actual facts don’t fit a politically spun narrative that one group with an extreme viewpoint and agenda with which they routinely supply their cheerleading newspapers and television stations.
Sweating in Maine
Men of Arkansas, if you think your life is difficult, try to imagine the joy all those fellas living in and around Kennebunk, Maine, are having since local police decided to begin slowly releasing the names of alleged clients of a Zumba instructor and alleged prostitute (notice all the allegeds).
To borrow a trademark expression of the late, great Razorback sportscaster Paul Eels: “Oh my!”
After police charged the 29-yearold woman and a male associate with operating a brothel from her exercise studio, they began releasing the names of those they claim collectively shelled out as much as $150,000 in fewer than two years. The two contend they are innocent.
Apparently the list contains the names of about 150 men, some well-known, from more than a dozen Maine communities. For example, the first group of 21 names included a former mayor. One high school hockey coach already has resigned in shame.
I can’t speak for you, but it’s mighty comforting to me to know that here in our own smallish Southern state, we wouldn’t have men engaging in that kind of self-indulgent horseplay. Otherwise, we could have 150 or more of our own fellas sweating as profusely as those guys in Maine, right?
Humanity rules
When I look across a restaurant today, or inside vehicles, or throughout stores and malls-you name the place-I’m still stunned by all the people preoccupied with cell phones rather than interacting with those beside them, or even what’s happening in the moment.
An email arrived on this very subject attributed to none other than the late Nobel Prize-winning physicist Albert Einstein. That prompted me to dig out this version, also attributed to Einstein: “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”
Well, thank goodness our humanity has found a way to overwhelm our technology over the past century.
Is the fat tongue stuffed in my left cheek showing?
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Mike Masterson’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected].
Editorial, Pages 85 on 10/28/2012