August is a Yellow Flame
“That August was like a yellow flame” – Anna Ahkmatova, 1917 / Anno Domini MCMXXI / III. The Voice of Memory
This August is indeed like a yellow flame
Death writhes among brown-burnt withering leaves
The grass is as sere as Macbeth’s acrid soul
And garden hoses drip in futility
The sun-bleached visage of Ozymandias
Might frown upon this blighted desert wrack
For not unlike the Ancient Mariner’s ghostly crew
The usages of summer drop and decay
But look…
But look above the last barren clouds in the west –
A tiny sliver of the promising moon
August is Unusually Hot – Someone Must be Punished for It
The gentleness of heaven is on the Sea:
Listen! The mighty Being is awake
And doth with his eternal motion make
A sound like thunder – everlastingly.
-Wordsworth, “It is a beauteous Evening, calm, and free”
Having barely graduated from high school (I think the quarter-credit for driver’s education put me over the top) I am certainly no climatologist, meteorologist, or vulgar Swedish child, but I am not persuaded that the concept of man-made climate change obtains.
Certainly the climate itself changes. Visitors to America’s high desert mountains often find fossils of sea-creatures from the long-ago when much of the western states were the bottom of the sea. There were land bridges between Asia and the Americas and between Europe and Britain which disappeared beneath rising oceans (gasp!) in times when human technology was pretty much limited to people throwing rocks at each other.
The Roman colonization of the then-warmer Britain included instituting the cultivation of grapevines for making wine, a practice which continued until the global cooling of the Little Ice Age of the 15th-18th centuries froze the vines out of sustainability in the island. The economic activities of Celts, Romans, Danes, Geats, Angles, Saxons, Frisians, or Gauls had no influence on the ever-changing weather.
Thus it is illogical and even presumptuous to conclude that someone driving to work in a vehicle powered by an internal-combustion is capable of unnaturally altering the climate of the planet.
We cannot even predict the weather accurately, much less control it.
This is a season of unusual but not unprecedented heat, drought, flooding, tropical storms, and, along the Mexico-USA border, an earthquake to accompany the flooding. To blame any of these aspects of weather and climate on any individual or group is a burn-the-witch mentality unworthy of adults who can read, write, do sums, and tie their shoelaces.
Personally, I blame all this rough weather on fluoride, cod liver oil, and Catholic space lasers but, hey, that’s just me.
Weather happens without regard for our activities or techno-superstitions.
At least that’s what The Voices keep telling me.
August is a Yellow Flame
“That August was like a yellow flame” – Anna Ahkmatova, 1917 / Anno Domini MCMXXI / III. The Voice of Memory
This August is indeed like a yellow flame
Death writhes among brown-burnt withering leaves
The grass is as sere as Macbeth’s acrid soul
And garden hoses drip in futility
The sun-bleached visage of Ozymandias
Might frown upon this blighted desert wrack
For not unlike the Ancient Mariner’s ghostly crew
The usages of summer drop and decay
But look…
But look above the last barren clouds in the west –
A tiny sliver of the promising moon
August is Unusually Hot – Someone Must be Punished for It
The gentleness of heaven is on the Sea:
Listen! The mighty Being is awake
And doth with his eternal motion make
A sound like thunder – everlastingly.
-Wordsworth, “It is a beauteous Evening, calm, and free”
Having barely graduated from high school (I think the quarter-credit for driver’s education put me over the top) I am certainly no climatologist, meteorologist, or vulgar Swedish child, but I am not persuaded that the concept of man-made climate change obtains.
Certainly the climate itself changes. Visitors to America’s high desert mountains often find fossils of sea-creatures from the long-ago when much of the western states were the bottom of the sea. There were land bridges between Asia and the Americas and between Europe and Britain which disappeared beneath rising oceans (gasp!) in times when human technology was pretty much limited to people throwing rocks at each other.
The Roman colonization of the then-warmer Britain included instituting the cultivation of grapevines for making wine, a practice which continued until the global cooling of the Little Ice Age of the 15th-18th centuries froze the vines out of sustainability in the island. The economic activities of Celts, Romans, Danes, Geats, Angles, Saxons, Frisians, or Gauls had no influence on the ever-changing weather.
Thus it is illogical and even presumptuous to conclude that someone driving to work in a vehicle powered by an internal-combustion is capable of unnaturally altering the climate of the planet.
We cannot even predict the weather accurately, much less control it.
This is a season of unusual but not unprecedented heat, drought, flooding, tropical storms, and, along the Mexico-USA border, an earthquake to accompany the flooding. To blame any of these aspects of weather and climate on any individual or group is a burn-the-witch mentality unworthy of adults who can read, write, do sums, and tie their shoelaces.
Personally, I blame all this rough weather on fluoride, cod liver oil, and Catholic space lasers but, hey, that’s just me.
Weather happens without regard for our activities or techno-superstitions.
At least that’s what The Voices keep telling me.