Angry About the Cold. It is three weeks before the end of summer, and we have just emerged from the coldest August I can recall. Remember that I'm 61 (and a half) years old. It's bad enuf that it is 69 degrees, dark, windy, and threatening two more days of rain on top of several we've already had in the past week, but I just opened my weekly emailed gardening newsletter from P. Allen Smith and read:

Although the weather is decidedly milder, the sweltering temperatures of the past few months are still on my mind. The Green movement could not ask for a better endorsement than the message Mother Nature put forth this summer. The extreme heat put a pretty bright spot light on our ever growing energy consumption. I don’t know about you, but it makes me feel pretty vulnerable.

Listen, buddy, it may have been "sweltering" in Arkansas, but aside from two heat waves, it has been cold as a witch's, um, heart around here.
+
Moreover, solar heat yields solar power, so to the extent your area actually might be warmer, it also receives more energy with which to power fans and air-conditioners. And please stop using the tired, despicable formulation "Mother Nature". If Nature is a mother, her name is "Medea".
+
Mr. Smith makes the natural assumption that his weather reflects the Nation's, but he's wrong. No one area reflects the entire Nation, much less the world. Everybody except New York-based media assumes that their own weather is indicative of larger trends. But here, Tristate, where it has been subnormally cold much of the past year (and longer), media still pound out the "global warming" propaganda, even as we had to close up our houses and turn on electric heaters in August! While we're doing that, and putting on sweaters and thinking about even wearing a coat if we'll be out of the house for several hours into the nite — in August and now the first of September! — we have to keep hearing about how hot the world is getting? It's intolerable.
+
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,642 — for Israel.)
+
Please consider making a small donation thru the Amazon Honor System to contribute to my work.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:04 PM