Alarmist: Certainly you realize that Phoenix’s temperatures are a warning sign, maybe even a sign that we’ve reached the “tipping point.” This 2023 summer is the worst.
Denier: Phoenix, you say? Phoenix?
You Know Where This Is Going
Alarmist: Well, not just Phoenix. Look at the temperatures in Death Valley, also. People are suffering all over the American South. People are dying. And this is just the start. I hear some guy just died in Death Valley. *
Denier: Thus the name. It’s not called Life Valley. And the guy who died? I read about him in the L. A. Times. He talked to a reporter before going “walkabout” on one of the Valley’s trails. When he was asked about going there in the heat, he said, “Why not?” Wonder whether he discovered the answer to his own question as his life faded from him. And here’s the mystery: He was 71. Seventy-one. Too bad he wasn’t as wise as Joe Biden who publicly said he was wise. Won’t find Joe on a walkabout where chances of tripping and falling are more numerous than the short stairs he now uses to enter Air Force One. Anyway, I heard delirium, confusion, and disorientation are symptoms of heat stroke, and Joe already exhibits those. Maybe he’s onto something about “global warming.” Well, according to the White House and Secretary Graham, he’ll have plenty cool water to drink with the new ban on gas water heaters.
Alarmist: What? You mock. It’s a sign of your ignorance.
Denier: Well, let’s get specific. What actions can you take to reduce these high July temperatures?
Alarmist: I drive a Prius.
Denier: Okay. How’s that working out for you? Could you use it to drive from Los Angeles to Vegas across the Mojave? Keep that 200-mile extension cord attached just in case and hope there are no “anthropogenic” brown outs or black outs where you plug in. Makes me think of the Stephen Wright joke about the kid who goes into the parking lot to return all the grocery carts. Wright says to him, “You know, someone else might want to use one of those.” And so it is with electricity. Hey, didn’t California’s governor ask people not to charge their vehicles a summer ago? Someone else might want to use your energy.
Alarmist: I’m doing my part, unlike you. If everyone does his part, we wouldn’t have global warming.
Denier: Just thinking here: What if an El Niño and not carbon is the cause of the South’s warm summer? And what if an El Niño gives the U.S. a very snowy winter? Maybe blizzards where there are now heat waves?
Alarmist: You can’t accept global warming and the role carbon plays. Global warming can cause severe winters. It’s all anthropogenic.
Denier: Afraid to say “manmade”? You know that άνθρωπος (anthropos) means “man”? So in your PC lingo, you use a foreign word that means “man.” But to your point: Actually, I do understand that the industrialized world pumps billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere. The problem is the thinking of you alarmists. Earth’s atmospheric carbon has fluctuated greatly—even before the species that used to be called “Man” existed.
Alarmist: Well, what’s that argument?
Denier: You want to point out a July in the Northern Hemisphere as a “warmest on record” month. And you cite the warmth of the South. First, your record is a paltry 170 years out of 4.6 billion years. Second, a complex atmosphere is influenced by a complex ocean, which happens right now to house an El Niño in the eastern Pacific. Third, you cite deaths from heat as evidence. You even cite the story of a guy who purposefully went into the summer heat of Death Valley. Would he have died if he had chosen to hike in a cooler location or if he had just stayed at home until the heat wave subsided?
Alarmist: What’s wrong with citing deaths? We’re all going to suffer and many will die.
The Denier Cites a Comedian and Tells an Anecdote
Denier: Consider modern humanity’s hubris best exemplified in the guy’s death. We live in deserts because of our technological ability to fulfill desire. What sense is there in that? I think of the late comedian Sam Kinison’s bit on the Ethiopian feminine. * I’ll paraphrase, but you can find the skit on YouTube. Kinison, who incorporated some screaming in his comedy, says in the skit that he empathizes with starving people. But he says something like “We’ve been sending film crews for 34 years to record the plight of the starving [in Ethiopia]. He then says, “Surely, the film crew could ‘hand the kid a sandwich.’” Kinison then goes on to say that he could solve the problem of world hunger: “Just don’t feed them; stop sending them food. Send them U-hauls instead.” And he argues that the people live where they can’t grow food. Kneeling down, he pretends to grab the soil and says, “You see this. This is sand. Nothing grows in it. Pack your stuff up and move to WHERE THE FOOD IS.” He then says—and this is decades ago—“We have deserts in America. WE JUST DON’T LIVE IN THEM.” Funny, very funny, but not true then and even less true now. Since his death in a car crash, the population of places like Phoenix has ballooned. We DO live in deserts. And we even have lawns around some of our desert homes. Lawns, Mr. Alarmist, LAWNS. In a desert! Do people have their heads up their cact-asses?
When Kinison was killed in 1992 in that “accident” caused by a drunk teenager, Phoenix’s population was 2.18 million; today it’s population is over four million. We do, sorry for the joke spoiler, live in deserts. And although there are cold deserts like the Atacama, Phoenix happens to be a “hot desert” in summer. I know; I’ve been there.
I climbed Camelback in Scottsdale, which is closer to Phoenix than a needle to a cactus. On a summer morning, starting at 4:30 a.m. when the temperature was in the low nineties, I made my way to the top. By the time I descended the mountain with an empty Camelbak Hydration Pack on my back at about 9:00 a.m., the temperature was in the higher nineties, and by afternoon, the temperature was 114 Fahrenheit. That was no problem for me, however, because by that time I was lying comfortably face up on a raft in the pool at the resort called Sanctuary, where i could stare at the mountaintop which I had climbed . From my position in the shade of some palm trees that overhung one side of the pool, I could see a helicopter rescue team hovering over the summit at the hottest time of the day. Yet another climber had succumbed to heat exhaustion on Camelback, a seemingly rather common problem on the mountain because I noticed the same kind of rescue effort after completing another climb on the following day. Who climbs a mountain in Arizona during the blistering afternoon heat?
So, “No, not true” to Kinison’s great punchline about not living in deserts. Americans do live in deserts, and they do so because of our giant economy, energy supply, and energy infrastructure. And having food shipped in from around the country and from other countries, we can survive better than the poor Ethiopians did in the heat of the 1980s. There's a certain unreality to our expectations because of all we have. I'm proof of American hubris and sense of invulnerability because I went to climb the mountain in summer. Looking back, I wonder what I might have done had I fallen and injured myself, preventing a timely descent.
We humans do succumb to limiting phenomena, and a rather extensive heat wave driven by a strengthening El Niño is one of those. With regard to living with limiting phenomena, I could make the same argument Kinison makes for those bitten by sharks. The answer to the problem isn’t some protective device; it’s not some relationship between humans and the ocean other than the simplest relationship: The answer to shark bites is, in a Kinison scream, “GET OUT OF THE WATER WHERE SHARKS SWIM.” Want to avoid the extreme summer heat that has hit the American South and Southwest for millennia? Don’t live in Phoenix. Or, at least, don’t live in Phoenix/Scottsdale in the summer.
Any of you alarmists remember the heat wave in Chicago in 1995? Hundreds died. Heat waves occur, just as one now in 2023 is occurring in Europe. But so do cold waves. I think the mid-to-late seventies in the Northeast, when, if I remember correctly, temps fell to the minus 15-20 Fahrenheit range with wind chills going to minus 45 or 50 in my region. I remember that because I could not stay outside chopping wood for the fireplace for less than about five to ten minutes without suffering frostbite.
So, Now We Hear the Standby Argument
Alarmist: But the heat waves will become more frequent.
Denier: More frequent than…Are you sure? They were pretty frequent when the Hopi had their civilization disrupted by decades of droughty conditions. And since you aren’t old enough to remember the Dust Bowl, I’d say that your personal experience with droughty hot conditions is probably limited. Go read, Of Mice and Men. Read about the great migration of Midwesterners to the more hospitable weather of 1930’s California.
Alarmist: You can’t deny that there’s more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today than there was before the Industrial Revolution.
Denier: No, I can’t, but I can say that over the past 55 million years give or take a week, the carbon content of the atmosphere has generally declined with some intermittent peaks. In other words, we were living with 250 part per million during the recent past of rather exceptional low carbon dioxide content. And there's been a rather steady rise in temperatures since the end of the massive continental glaciation while the overriding trend of decreasing carbon dioxide dropped to that pre-Industrial level. Just know that there have been times when Earth has warmed to the point of being largely ice free, and carbon content doesn't seem to have been the direct cause.
Alarmist: But we need to consider that we do have a large population that will suffer. And if the planet does become ice free, where will the population of the Coastal Plain go? You know the seas are rising.
Denier: To what extent? Millimeters? A meter in the next 850 years? And where will they affect the land? Southern Florida? Delaware? Just remember your history. Seas were as much as 400 feet lower during the peak of the glaciation. They've been rising for 10 millennia.
Alarmist: People just can’t pick up and move.
Denier: You’re right, generally people, even in industrialized nations can't move. But the Delaware Biden family can move to all those countries where they’ve established strong financial connections. The economic opportunities have to be right for ordinary citizens to move.
The reality is that all of us choose to stay in hardship or potential hardship, don’t we. And I’m not just talking drug addicts and inner city poor. i count myself. I live in the woods. If some severe drought hits my area, I might lose my house in a forest fire. In fact, western Pennsylvania did have such a drought some three decades ago, making me somewhat concerned about the potential for a forest fire. And like so many living in Phoenix today, I didn’t move. But no amount of driving Priuses is going to alter forces that are as large as an El Niño, La Niña, or Pacific Decadal Oscillation. And no number of wind turbines will counter a change in solar energy driven by the presence of absence of sunspots, or of volcanic eruptions such as those of the early nineteenth century that cooled the Northern Hemisphere and caused the "Year without a Summer." And in addition to eruptions cooling the planet, there are the unaccounted for volcanic eruptions on the sea floor’s giant divergent ridge systems. If I remember, researchers out of the University of Texas at Austin discovered that geothermal heat from beneath Antarctica was melting the underside of the famous Thwaites Glacier. ** That geothermal heat has nothing to do with “anthropogenic emissions,” but it might be pumping heat into the oceans, heat that bleeds into the atmosphere and causes currents to alter their courses. We really don’t have a handle on the total undersea volcanism or on its possible trends toward increased or decreased activity. There are almost 20,000 undersea volcanoes in addition to that magma under Thwaites. Ever think that they might be warming the ocean from below?
Alarmist: The emissions of carbon are changing the weather. You just don’t want to admit it, so you look for other causes.
Denier: That’s not actually demonstrable at this time. Even the data-fudging IPCC researchers can’t prove that irrefutably. Much of what they publish can be attributed to local effects. Much is developed on non sequitur reasoning. We won’t know for decades or even centuries whether or not there is a direct correlation. Many past rises in carbon content have actually followed global warming. And many peaks in carbon content have foreshadowed global cooling. But really, even you have to admit that the last great ice advances were not the product of human-caused warming. Humans might have caused the extinction the great mammals, but the extinction the great ice sheets is another matter. We’ve been in an interglacial for thousands of years with some small variations like the Little Ice Age. Warming and cooling seem more closely aligned with Milankovitch Cycles.
Alarmist: Argh! There it is. No doubt you’ll tell me about the Medieval Warm Period next.
Denier: No, have a nice day, and remember to drink plenty of water. I’m going to the pool to enjoy the summer because I know from personal experience that winter, severe or mild, is sure to arrive by December. That’s one prediction I have never gotten wrong. And if Mother Nature decides to give me another rather mild winter, I say "thanks." I didn't have to use my snowblower this past winter. You should be happy about that because it's gas-powered. See, I'm doing my part to "save the planet" by not using that internal combustion engine.
Alarmist: Argh! You deniers are murderers just the way anti-maskers and anti-children-vaccinators were murderers. I follow the science.
Denier: Whatever. You forgot to mention that you also follow Greta.
*Brian Brant, 24 Jul 2023. Hiker Who Died in Death Valley Spoke to Reporter about Risking Extreme Heat Hours Earlier: ‘Why Not?’ Online at https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/hiker-died-death-valley-spoke-211647757.html
** "Evidence for elevated and spatially variable geothermal flux beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet," by Dustin M. Schroeder, Donald D. Blankenship, Duncan A. Young, and Enrica Quartini. PNAS, 2014: www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1405184111
Denier: Phoenix, you say? Phoenix?
You Know Where This Is Going
Alarmist: Well, not just Phoenix. Look at the temperatures in Death Valley, also. People are suffering all over the American South. People are dying. And this is just the start. I hear some guy just died in Death Valley. *
Denier: Thus the name. It’s not called Life Valley. And the guy who died? I read about him in the L. A. Times. He talked to a reporter before going “walkabout” on one of the Valley’s trails. When he was asked about going there in the heat, he said, “Why not?” Wonder whether he discovered the answer to his own question as his life faded from him. And here’s the mystery: He was 71. Seventy-one. Too bad he wasn’t as wise as Joe Biden who publicly said he was wise. Won’t find Joe on a walkabout where chances of tripping and falling are more numerous than the short stairs he now uses to enter Air Force One. Anyway, I heard delirium, confusion, and disorientation are symptoms of heat stroke, and Joe already exhibits those. Maybe he’s onto something about “global warming.” Well, according to the White House and Secretary Graham, he’ll have plenty cool water to drink with the new ban on gas water heaters.
Alarmist: What? You mock. It’s a sign of your ignorance.
Denier: Well, let’s get specific. What actions can you take to reduce these high July temperatures?
Alarmist: I drive a Prius.
Denier: Okay. How’s that working out for you? Could you use it to drive from Los Angeles to Vegas across the Mojave? Keep that 200-mile extension cord attached just in case and hope there are no “anthropogenic” brown outs or black outs where you plug in. Makes me think of the Stephen Wright joke about the kid who goes into the parking lot to return all the grocery carts. Wright says to him, “You know, someone else might want to use one of those.” And so it is with electricity. Hey, didn’t California’s governor ask people not to charge their vehicles a summer ago? Someone else might want to use your energy.
Alarmist: I’m doing my part, unlike you. If everyone does his part, we wouldn’t have global warming.
Denier: Just thinking here: What if an El Niño and not carbon is the cause of the South’s warm summer? And what if an El Niño gives the U.S. a very snowy winter? Maybe blizzards where there are now heat waves?
Alarmist: You can’t accept global warming and the role carbon plays. Global warming can cause severe winters. It’s all anthropogenic.
Denier: Afraid to say “manmade”? You know that άνθρωπος (anthropos) means “man”? So in your PC lingo, you use a foreign word that means “man.” But to your point: Actually, I do understand that the industrialized world pumps billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere. The problem is the thinking of you alarmists. Earth’s atmospheric carbon has fluctuated greatly—even before the species that used to be called “Man” existed.
Alarmist: Well, what’s that argument?
Denier: You want to point out a July in the Northern Hemisphere as a “warmest on record” month. And you cite the warmth of the South. First, your record is a paltry 170 years out of 4.6 billion years. Second, a complex atmosphere is influenced by a complex ocean, which happens right now to house an El Niño in the eastern Pacific. Third, you cite deaths from heat as evidence. You even cite the story of a guy who purposefully went into the summer heat of Death Valley. Would he have died if he had chosen to hike in a cooler location or if he had just stayed at home until the heat wave subsided?
Alarmist: What’s wrong with citing deaths? We’re all going to suffer and many will die.
The Denier Cites a Comedian and Tells an Anecdote
Denier: Consider modern humanity’s hubris best exemplified in the guy’s death. We live in deserts because of our technological ability to fulfill desire. What sense is there in that? I think of the late comedian Sam Kinison’s bit on the Ethiopian feminine. * I’ll paraphrase, but you can find the skit on YouTube. Kinison, who incorporated some screaming in his comedy, says in the skit that he empathizes with starving people. But he says something like “We’ve been sending film crews for 34 years to record the plight of the starving [in Ethiopia]. He then says, “Surely, the film crew could ‘hand the kid a sandwich.’” Kinison then goes on to say that he could solve the problem of world hunger: “Just don’t feed them; stop sending them food. Send them U-hauls instead.” And he argues that the people live where they can’t grow food. Kneeling down, he pretends to grab the soil and says, “You see this. This is sand. Nothing grows in it. Pack your stuff up and move to WHERE THE FOOD IS.” He then says—and this is decades ago—“We have deserts in America. WE JUST DON’T LIVE IN THEM.” Funny, very funny, but not true then and even less true now. Since his death in a car crash, the population of places like Phoenix has ballooned. We DO live in deserts. And we even have lawns around some of our desert homes. Lawns, Mr. Alarmist, LAWNS. In a desert! Do people have their heads up their cact-asses?
When Kinison was killed in 1992 in that “accident” caused by a drunk teenager, Phoenix’s population was 2.18 million; today it’s population is over four million. We do, sorry for the joke spoiler, live in deserts. And although there are cold deserts like the Atacama, Phoenix happens to be a “hot desert” in summer. I know; I’ve been there.
I climbed Camelback in Scottsdale, which is closer to Phoenix than a needle to a cactus. On a summer morning, starting at 4:30 a.m. when the temperature was in the low nineties, I made my way to the top. By the time I descended the mountain with an empty Camelbak Hydration Pack on my back at about 9:00 a.m., the temperature was in the higher nineties, and by afternoon, the temperature was 114 Fahrenheit. That was no problem for me, however, because by that time I was lying comfortably face up on a raft in the pool at the resort called Sanctuary, where i could stare at the mountaintop which I had climbed . From my position in the shade of some palm trees that overhung one side of the pool, I could see a helicopter rescue team hovering over the summit at the hottest time of the day. Yet another climber had succumbed to heat exhaustion on Camelback, a seemingly rather common problem on the mountain because I noticed the same kind of rescue effort after completing another climb on the following day. Who climbs a mountain in Arizona during the blistering afternoon heat?
So, “No, not true” to Kinison’s great punchline about not living in deserts. Americans do live in deserts, and they do so because of our giant economy, energy supply, and energy infrastructure. And having food shipped in from around the country and from other countries, we can survive better than the poor Ethiopians did in the heat of the 1980s. There's a certain unreality to our expectations because of all we have. I'm proof of American hubris and sense of invulnerability because I went to climb the mountain in summer. Looking back, I wonder what I might have done had I fallen and injured myself, preventing a timely descent.
We humans do succumb to limiting phenomena, and a rather extensive heat wave driven by a strengthening El Niño is one of those. With regard to living with limiting phenomena, I could make the same argument Kinison makes for those bitten by sharks. The answer to the problem isn’t some protective device; it’s not some relationship between humans and the ocean other than the simplest relationship: The answer to shark bites is, in a Kinison scream, “GET OUT OF THE WATER WHERE SHARKS SWIM.” Want to avoid the extreme summer heat that has hit the American South and Southwest for millennia? Don’t live in Phoenix. Or, at least, don’t live in Phoenix/Scottsdale in the summer.
Any of you alarmists remember the heat wave in Chicago in 1995? Hundreds died. Heat waves occur, just as one now in 2023 is occurring in Europe. But so do cold waves. I think the mid-to-late seventies in the Northeast, when, if I remember correctly, temps fell to the minus 15-20 Fahrenheit range with wind chills going to minus 45 or 50 in my region. I remember that because I could not stay outside chopping wood for the fireplace for less than about five to ten minutes without suffering frostbite.
So, Now We Hear the Standby Argument
Alarmist: But the heat waves will become more frequent.
Denier: More frequent than…Are you sure? They were pretty frequent when the Hopi had their civilization disrupted by decades of droughty conditions. And since you aren’t old enough to remember the Dust Bowl, I’d say that your personal experience with droughty hot conditions is probably limited. Go read, Of Mice and Men. Read about the great migration of Midwesterners to the more hospitable weather of 1930’s California.
Alarmist: You can’t deny that there’s more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today than there was before the Industrial Revolution.
Denier: No, I can’t, but I can say that over the past 55 million years give or take a week, the carbon content of the atmosphere has generally declined with some intermittent peaks. In other words, we were living with 250 part per million during the recent past of rather exceptional low carbon dioxide content. And there's been a rather steady rise in temperatures since the end of the massive continental glaciation while the overriding trend of decreasing carbon dioxide dropped to that pre-Industrial level. Just know that there have been times when Earth has warmed to the point of being largely ice free, and carbon content doesn't seem to have been the direct cause.
Alarmist: But we need to consider that we do have a large population that will suffer. And if the planet does become ice free, where will the population of the Coastal Plain go? You know the seas are rising.
Denier: To what extent? Millimeters? A meter in the next 850 years? And where will they affect the land? Southern Florida? Delaware? Just remember your history. Seas were as much as 400 feet lower during the peak of the glaciation. They've been rising for 10 millennia.
Alarmist: People just can’t pick up and move.
Denier: You’re right, generally people, even in industrialized nations can't move. But the Delaware Biden family can move to all those countries where they’ve established strong financial connections. The economic opportunities have to be right for ordinary citizens to move.
The reality is that all of us choose to stay in hardship or potential hardship, don’t we. And I’m not just talking drug addicts and inner city poor. i count myself. I live in the woods. If some severe drought hits my area, I might lose my house in a forest fire. In fact, western Pennsylvania did have such a drought some three decades ago, making me somewhat concerned about the potential for a forest fire. And like so many living in Phoenix today, I didn’t move. But no amount of driving Priuses is going to alter forces that are as large as an El Niño, La Niña, or Pacific Decadal Oscillation. And no number of wind turbines will counter a change in solar energy driven by the presence of absence of sunspots, or of volcanic eruptions such as those of the early nineteenth century that cooled the Northern Hemisphere and caused the "Year without a Summer." And in addition to eruptions cooling the planet, there are the unaccounted for volcanic eruptions on the sea floor’s giant divergent ridge systems. If I remember, researchers out of the University of Texas at Austin discovered that geothermal heat from beneath Antarctica was melting the underside of the famous Thwaites Glacier. ** That geothermal heat has nothing to do with “anthropogenic emissions,” but it might be pumping heat into the oceans, heat that bleeds into the atmosphere and causes currents to alter their courses. We really don’t have a handle on the total undersea volcanism or on its possible trends toward increased or decreased activity. There are almost 20,000 undersea volcanoes in addition to that magma under Thwaites. Ever think that they might be warming the ocean from below?
Alarmist: The emissions of carbon are changing the weather. You just don’t want to admit it, so you look for other causes.
Denier: That’s not actually demonstrable at this time. Even the data-fudging IPCC researchers can’t prove that irrefutably. Much of what they publish can be attributed to local effects. Much is developed on non sequitur reasoning. We won’t know for decades or even centuries whether or not there is a direct correlation. Many past rises in carbon content have actually followed global warming. And many peaks in carbon content have foreshadowed global cooling. But really, even you have to admit that the last great ice advances were not the product of human-caused warming. Humans might have caused the extinction the great mammals, but the extinction the great ice sheets is another matter. We’ve been in an interglacial for thousands of years with some small variations like the Little Ice Age. Warming and cooling seem more closely aligned with Milankovitch Cycles.
Alarmist: Argh! There it is. No doubt you’ll tell me about the Medieval Warm Period next.
Denier: No, have a nice day, and remember to drink plenty of water. I’m going to the pool to enjoy the summer because I know from personal experience that winter, severe or mild, is sure to arrive by December. That’s one prediction I have never gotten wrong. And if Mother Nature decides to give me another rather mild winter, I say "thanks." I didn't have to use my snowblower this past winter. You should be happy about that because it's gas-powered. See, I'm doing my part to "save the planet" by not using that internal combustion engine.
Alarmist: Argh! You deniers are murderers just the way anti-maskers and anti-children-vaccinators were murderers. I follow the science.
Denier: Whatever. You forgot to mention that you also follow Greta.
*Brian Brant, 24 Jul 2023. Hiker Who Died in Death Valley Spoke to Reporter about Risking Extreme Heat Hours Earlier: ‘Why Not?’ Online at https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/hiker-died-death-valley-spoke-211647757.html
** "Evidence for elevated and spatially variable geothermal flux beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet," by Dustin M. Schroeder, Donald D. Blankenship, Duncan A. Young, and Enrica Quartini. PNAS, 2014: www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1405184111
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