Local Warming Is a Fact

My part of the world is tilted sunward at this time of year, and we have really been feeling those solar flares. Even in the cool green hollow in which the Cat Sanctuary nestles, far enough up the Blue Ridge Mountains that our water boils at 218 degrees Fahrenheit, we've had temperatures well over ninety degrees Fahrenheit. How often, and by how far, downtown Kingsport has broken the 40-degree-Celsius mark, I'm glad I don't know. The temperatures at their official weather station always run so much closer to ours.

Downtown Kingsport, like downtown inmost cities and large towns, has been miserable. It's hard to say how much of the misery observed in our cities has been caused by the heat, by chemical pollution, by delayed reactions to the coronavirus and/or the vaccine, or by the combination of these things. All I know for sure is that the rate of disabling, even hospital-room-worthy, symptoms among people I know has been fierce.

Four out of six people with whom I'd been working, this spring, have been hospitalized: two cardiac cases, one case that started out with a simple accident and then went on from there, one case for which I've not heard an official diagnosis. Plus the odd-jobs man was hospitalized after an accident, but not for a full day--he's still drifting around the neighborhood, working when hired. Of the crowd that used to hang out on the porch of the retirement project in Gate City, I've seen two of the better preserved ones, still on their feet. They were the ones who drove and did errands for the others, last summer., They no longer drive or do errands.

My Significant Other wanted to be one of the first to try the COVID vaccine, because he hadn't noticed having the virus and wanted to reassure people about the vaccine. Bless him. He had no immediate reaction. He'd been fighting chronic Lyme Disease for ten years. In December he went into the hospital for an operation that sounded horrible. He's ot up yet. He's still maintaining a cell phone, but he's not getting much use out of it.

I had the virus, advised the State to send my vaccine to one of the countries that reportedly needed it, and what I hear these days is "You're looking well--gaining weight, and didn't you dye your hair? I've seen it starting to look grey, but now it's black!"

That's the part of glyphosate poisoning that shows. That's what pain looks like, Gentle Readers. The rest of my body looks the way it always has, but glyphosate reactions cause the midsection to puff out, with inflammation and fluid retention more than actual gas or blocked bodywastes. It's like being pregnant with poison. I hate it, feel disfigured by it, don't find it physically comfortable either (especially when wearing clothes that have waistlines). And both white and black hairs fall out, but the white hair falls off faster and grows back more slowly. And I feel tired and bummed out, and arm starting to show various nutrient deficiencies due to being unable to digest nutrients, so between the lack of energy, the continually lurking sub-nausea, and the black hair, I really feel as if I might be twenty-nine again.

Remember We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Gentle Readers? It was a very literary, credible, brilliant study o a young psychopath. Merricat Blackwood expressed annoyance with her family, when corrected for some childish fault, by poisoning all but two of the extended family gathered for dinner. In the present reality of the story we see her heading into another family conflict. It's one of the few really well written horror stories in English literature.

Can you imagine the law saying to Merricat Blackwood, "Of course you mustn't buy any more arsenic, but you must go ahead and use up your existing supply"? No? But that's what our government is currently doing about glyphosate. The day when it's actually going to be taken off the market keeps being pushed back. The corporations must be allowed to sell, and the fools who still buy glyphosate and other poisons must be allowed to use up, their existing supply. Possibly some of our legislators and judges ought to have dinner with Merricat Blackwood.

The name "Merricat," you might like to know, is explained in the book as a childish variation on "Mary Catherine," but it's also been documented in other countries as a term of hate for Americans. (And of course one of Al Gore's kids thought that would be a great name for a charity...bless her heart.) The Trump Administration applied pressure for countries like Thailand and Korea to lift the glyphosate bans their people unanimously want. I've not read that the Biden Administration has done thing one about this situation. So calling American poison sprayers "Merricats" does seem sort of appropriate.

"I've been spraying this, instead," said the Grouch cheerfully, as if expecting commendations. 2,4-D? Where'd he ever dig that up? I tried to remember what I knew offhand about 2,4-D. In 1974, the last year my Drill Sergeant Dad was asked to teach a class about this kind of thing, that name appeared on a list of known carcinogens, which I remembered because the names rimed:

chlordane

lindane

malathion

parathion

cyperquat

paraquat

2,4-D

2,4-T

Then I seem to remember paraquat distracting me. It was then suspected, and is now known, to cause Parkinson's Disease. I had a great-uncle who had that. Call him Great-Uncle Park. Dad got the whole neighborhood turned against the idea of spraying poison because look at him. I'm one of the last few living people who remember hearing Great-Uncle Park speak. He had been a preacher, a muscular Christian, farming forty acres and rearing seven sons. My sister remembers him mute and bedfast, harmless but horrifying, the Nightmare Life-In-Death. He went down that fast. He was disabled for almost twenty years before he died.

"Are you feeling suicidal?" I said to the Grouch.

"What's it do, besides causing cancer?" he said. "I'm seventy-five years old. We all have to go some time."

"What does the label say it does?" I was curious. The label didn't mention 2,4-D causing cancer but did warn that the stuff is so corrosive that a person who has swallowed it should not be allowed to vomit. Allowed. The person would want to. The label also mentioned that the poison would kill various desirable plants in the Grouch's yard.

"I can't believe it's not illegal to spray things like that in town, where they'll destroy your neighbors' gardens and make your neighbors ill," I said.

"That neighbor sprays glyphosate," the Grouch pointed, "and every time that one mows his grass I get hayfever. I don't care about them."

It is hard to dispute that, if people are still spraying glyphosate, their greatest achievement in this life will probably be as cadavers donated to medical science, and the sooner they perform that service, the better. However, inflicting yet another carcinogen to the toxic waste we in the Point of Virginia inflict on innocent people in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana is not the right thing to do with the feelings any rational being would naturally have about the glyphosate-spraying neighbor.

"That neighbor has children, and that one has dogs," I said. "And I have relatives in Tennessee who never did you any harm."

The Grouch wanted to change the subject. "Doesn't it seem to you that this summer's the hottest one you can remember?" he said.

"Actually," I said, "it reminds me of the summer of 1987. Though 1994 was a miserably hot summer, too. And although you and I were too young to feel it, a lot of older people died of the heat waves in 1977." In 1977 the Grouch was working full time. I was still lazing around the house, listening to the reports about heat-related fatalities on the Mutual News & Sports Radio Network.

(By some synchronicity, I then went home and turned up an old newspaper I saved for some other reason. On the back I read: "North Dakota's all-time high temperature was set here [in the town called Steele] in July 1936, at 121. [Interviewee Paul] Smokov, now 81, remembers that time and believes conditions this summer probably are worse," because the drought had "started in the late 1990s. 'The 1999 to 2006 drought ranks only behind the 1930s and the 1950s. It's the third-worst drought on record...' [federal meteorologist Brad] Rippey said.")

"If it snows in July," said the Grouch, "would you say you remembered that having happened before/"

"No," I said. "That was in 1920. My grandfather remembered it, but I'm not quite that old."

This was on the day the POG lay down and died. The POG, or Piece Of Garbage, was the miserable excuse for a laptop I used for two full years. I was surprised, and in a way disappointed, that that thing lasted a month. I don't like any computer that's infected with Windows 10, but it was the way the POG tried to force me to use battery power that gave me the time to entertain all those fantasies about taking it down to the lake and throwing it in. This laptop has a battery too feeble for almost any purpose...and that's actually an improvement over the POG. There are attempts at Green changes that turn people against the whole concept of Greenness.

Nevertheless, it occurred to me that this web site needs a post about climate change.

Here's the deal. Climate change is not just a science fiction trope any more. It is as indisputable as that spraying glyphosate is a way of torturing and killing people.

The downtown core of Kingsport, Tennessee, is about ten miles south oft he Cat Sanctuary. It is slightly closer to sea level, and is located on the banks of the Holston River. In the 1980s the temperature in downtown Kingsport ran three to five scrawny Fahrenheit degrees warmer than the temperature at the Cat Sanctuary. In theory "greenhouse gas" emissions are suppose dot have been better filtered since the 1990s, so in theory this "greenhouse effect" on temperatures should have become less noticeable now. Has this actually worked the way left-wingers claim? It has not. Today we routinely see temperatures in downtown Kingsport twenty Fahrenheit degrees hotter than the temperature at the Cat Sanctuary. Whatever has been done to reduce the greenhouse effect in the 199s has been offset by other factors.

The climate at the Cat Sanctuary has not changed noticeably since the 1970ps.The weather changes from day to day, from year to year. There are hotter and milder seasons, wetter and drier ones, colder and milder ones, earlier and later springs, more and less colorful autumns, richer and poorer harvests. The traditional rule for people who have orchards has always been to plant both peach and apple trees so that, more years than not, the orchard will produce one kind of fruit or the other. Usually it will be apples. In 1981, we had a cool wet spring followed by a sunny summer, and people harvested both peaches and apples. I've not heard of that happening twice; it was probably my generation's equivalent of Grandfather's having seen snow on the Fourth of July. This year's early, warm, dry spring, followed by a wet summer, is not making farmers happy. But this kind of year-to-year variation is not what is meant by terms like "climate change." Weather changes, sometimes from hour to hour. Climate is the whole general range of weather that can be expected in a given part of the world.

But the climate of downtown America has changed drastically since the 1970s. Even in the 1970s it was true for the big cities that, e.g., temperatures on the National Mall ran eight to ten degrees hotter than temperatures in Alexandria and Takoma Park, whose temperatures ran eight to ten degrees hotter than in Fairfax and Columbia. That gap has not closed, or even narrowed. If anything it's grown. The climate along the Maryland-Virginia border is generally mild, pleasant, and what the majority of humans like. The climate in downtown D.C. is too hot for almost anybody's comfort.

(Tip for those who must be in the city in the summer: Buy those huge cheap styrofoam cups full of ice chips. Never mind the soda pop; just carry around the ice chips. You might be able to use them to save a life.)

We know this change is human-made because it's observed only in "downtown" areas. Heat pumps push more hot air outdoors, downtown. More pavement traps more heat. More glass windows and metal vehicles reflect more heat. More human bodies emit heat into the ar. So the temperatures in and near cities rise, while the temperatures in the country stay the same.

It could still be called the greenhouse effect, if the activists who were screaming about the greenhouse effect in the 1990s hadn't promised to shut up when they got the legislation they wanted. If fewer "greenhouse gas" emissions are causing it, other factors are aggravating it more.

Meanwhile, "global climate change" was supposed to refer to the ice age in the 1980s. If you don't remember that, that would be because no such ice age ever arrived; in fact several heat records were set in the 1980s. Then "global climate change" was redefined as referring to a global warming effect that raised sea level to the point where the Atlantic would be lapping around the beaches of Asheville, North Carolina, by 2010. Oh wait, that never happened either. "Global climate change" still refers to any of several other theories, none of which has been proved, several of which have been disproved, but a vague general sense of which ha become an article of faith in the Socialist substitute-for-religion that wants to worship global dictatorship.

Traditional religions allow room for counterfactual beliefs by postulating a spiritual dimension of reality where people may feel effects of what they know to be true, without being able to measure any effects empirically. The radical rabbi Yeshua ben Yosef from Nazareth died in the early first century; the God he incarnated lives on in the hearts of His followers. Socialism, which began by explicitly denying that possibility for "spiritualizing" counterfactual beliefs, will have a harder time selling its dogma that "only global dictatorship can save us form global climate change." Still so many apparently rational people currently claim to believe that, a rationale for it is sure to be found or invented any day.

So far, some temperature readings, which some regard as evidence of global climate change, have shown a steady warming trend. It's certainly possible that this warming is dangerous. It won't be scientifically proved so unless, and until, the dangers have become facts.

Socialist readers, if we have any, please pay close attention to this:

How much are people likely to want to sacrifice to avert the possibility that one more theory, proposed by people who proposed some other theories that have been disproved, might turn out to be true? Not much.

How much are people likely to want to sacrifice to reduce their own personal misery, which they feel, and see their neighbors feeling, as they swelter in our cities? Not much, at first. Nobody wants to leave the windows open when the neighbors' heat pump start spewing out heat. Nobody wants to be the first one to report for work with a sweaty face from walking instead of driving in an air-conditioned car. But people are more likely to endure that kind of thing to make a difference they can see and feel, in the local warming nobody can deny, than they are for the sake of some theory espoused by somebody like Al Gore.

Now I know left-wingers have an agenda and won't let themselves be confused by mere facts. I know that, for example, they kept screaming for same-sex marriage as opposed to an end to legal discrimination against the unmarried--never mind that half of every same-sex couple is going to end up without a living spouse, just as half of every heterosexual couple is, so at best same-sex marriage would only benefit half of the people who wanted it. I know the only effect presenting reasonable ideas to these people is likely to have is to make them screech and throw nasty stuff in all directions, just like the animals from whom they used to claim physical descent.

Well, y'know what, Gentle Readers, I am already old enough, biracial enough, non-wealthy enough, and female enough, that haters are going to hate me anyway.

It's nice to look for points of agreement with everybody who's willing to find them, but it's a waste of time to try to please people who aren't going to be pleased.

Anyway, for those who are thinking rationally, there's an obvious call to action here. Leave the speculation about what might happen in the year 2050 or the year 2120 or even the year 2023 to the fiction writers. Speculation can be useful too. But, meanwhile, when calling for people to change their habits, we should back away from theories and dogmas, and stick to facts. If you want to reverse climate change or prevent even more harmful future climate change, you talk about what's happening now, what people can see and feel, ideally, this summer.

Greenland is losing valuable ice. It's possible that the local warming felt in Boston, Montreal, Stockholm, or Vladivostok may be contributing to this loss of ice. It's certain that more people are living more comfortably in Greenland, in ways that affect Greenland the way the comforts and conveniences in Boston, Montreal, Stockholm,  and Vladivostok affect those cities. It's possible that more Green consciousness in Boston would help Greenland keep its glaciers; if that happened it would be a weaker side effect of the stronger effect Bostonians' Green choices were having on Boston.

Sometimes we can be like the toddler whose hand, while clutching six cookies, is too wide to slip out of the cookie jar. In order to eat a cookie the toddler is going to have to release the whole fistful of cookies, unclench the fist, and draw out one cookie between fingers. If left-wingers seriously want to feel less miserable they need to release their dogmas about "global" anything and work with the local facts, which are unlikely to backfire on them as yet another global theory bites the dust. When it comes to that, it's also good to release the dogma about bigger government doing anything to help anything. We've all seen what the Obama, Trump, and Biden Administrations have done to reverse the effects of glyphosate, and we can reasonably expect any other big government, U.S. or foreign or "global," to do about that much--which is to say, to do nothing--about any climate change that actually happens.

Stick to propositions that relate to what can be objectively verified in the real world. A line I've seen work to change people's behavior was, "We have X number of parking spaces that will remain in available during reconstruction. We have X number of spaces that will have to be closed. We have X number of cars parked outside tonight. Obviously a solution to this problem will involve car pools. Will everyone who wants to keep these events going all summer please sign the car pool form and make yourselves known to the people in neighborhoods near yours."

Similarly: "Showers are being installed in the restrooms, and enclosed closets with space to store clean work outfits, clean outfits to walk home in, and the outfits you wore while walking to work, are being added to every office. While no questions will be asked about physical disabilities, a general policy will be that raises and promotions go to people who walk to and from work."

It's easy to get carried away with our own little ideas of how to make the world better. If I were the mayor of Kingsport, I'd be tempted to declare a state of emergency. Publicize "Code Red Days" and order city bus drivers to offer free rides to anyone walking on those 90-degree-heat, 90-percent-humidity days. Tax people to build free cold shower devices and install one on every alternate corner. Use heavy preaching, restrictions, and bans to reduce the use of motor vehicles, heat pumps, and heat-trapping pavement. Tear up the pavement on Center, Sullivan, Fort Henry, Eastman, and Stone Drive; cover those streets with grass and gravel, and limit their use to motor-free traffic only. Require all gas stations to replace all but one gas pump with solar-powered battery stands. Give people tax breaks for making better use of low-energy-use climate controls like separating rooms, opening windows, and burning biomass instead of gas or electricity. Require schools to give students "Green points" for doing all their research from printed material with no use of heat-generating, air-conditioning-dependent computers. Fine stores for using computerized price scanners instead of price stickers and solar-powered calculators. Give tax breaks to businesses that install shower stalls and remove computer terminals. Sponsor a factory where people build replicas of the world's best word processing device, the Royal Standard typewriter, and make it the standard for all school and office communication.

And, because these measures would be all about me, my ego, my good idea over your bad habit, Kingsport would be howling for a special election to replace me within a month. People would claim that they had arthritis and couldn't bear to type on real typewriters. Messy garbage would be dumped in the shower stalls. It'd be similar to the way even people who'd been wanting to ride bicycles around Kingsport reacted to the bicycle lanes, only moreso.

True Green changes come from the grassroots. People in government can certainly encourage Green choices; Green choices work best when nobody tries to force them on anybody.

One of the easiest ways to stop local warming is to stop using motor vehicles. But even on a college-campus scale, top-down bans on motor vehicles can backfire. People with major mobility impairments need to be able to drive. They should be able to win friends and influence people by making every drive a social event. The rest of us, when we see one of our number driving, could be sighing and clucking. "Poor old John Doe, I just realized how much older he is than he looks. I saw him driving, alone, just from his house to the hardware store!" With corrections: "Biomass burns hot. Biomass-burning furnaces are very heavy. Maybe he needed the minivan to haul his new biomass burner." But meanwhile anyone who wanted to be seen as young and fit would be bringing home, e.g., a new bathroom sink, in a handcart. That's an achievable Green change we can make just by agreeing that it's trendy. And it would do a lot to reverse local warming.

Other realistic approaches to the indisputable fact of local warming would work in similar ways. Land use regulations can favor conversions of property back to small farms, away from stack-and-pack apartment blocks. Every child deserves a room and a garden of per own. Most work can and should be done in the workers' homes, and no, no invasive camera technology is necessary, just digital text messaging is enough to allow communication and supervision. Most people need to go downtown only once a week, but can't we work up to only once a month?

A problem in public health and safety is that people seem often to have an unconscious set-point of "acceptable risk" that they try to maintain. When things they do are made safer, people do those things in riskier ways. When every car had seat belts, people demanded higher speed limits. Those who really want to reverse warming should probably bear this in mind. Better filters encourage people to feel less guilt about driving when they could walk. One way to offset this is to redirect the focus of campaigns away from "safety" to the benefits of the target behavior. Instead of talking about even local warming at all, we might want to talk about the benefits of walking for weight control and the convenience of removing electrical power grids from our lives.

"But 'warming' is part of another campaign," some people might say. Consider Elon Musk, the genius car designer and would-be Twitter renovator. One of those friends who had a project going on early this spring, then spent the summer in and out of hospitals, was (is! is! person is still alive!) a fan of his. "Battery cars work! I could build one! I want to buy a couple dozen battery-powered cars cheap in China and resell them here. We could buy that old convenience store and convert it to a battery charging station!" I read about solar-battery-powered cars in grade seven and wrote science fiction in which the cool guys converted a trendy sports car to solar battery power. For some Americans the idea of solar vehicles is a self-seller. When it's not, the major point of doubt is "Could all those batteries be charged by solar power alone?" From my point of view, it seems as if Musk's main communication challenge now is (1) being sure he actually has a workable plan to charge all those batteries, and (2) convincing my neighbors.

From Musk's point of view, it's obviously product-supportive if people believe that some version of some "global climate change" theory is true. But that's a dangerous marketing ploy; people who believed that Florida was going to be underwater in 2010, the way Al Gore said, have cooled to the point of frost on both "global warming" and Al Gore.

I'd suggest to Musk and company that they consider the set-point model and then think about ways to market solar-powered cars that do not depend on theories of global climate change. Plenty of facts can be made to support the product:

* Battery-powered cars are new, youthful, trendy, and they can be made cute. (The ones I've seen bordered on being fubsy. For a car I prefer the small-and-efficient kind of cuteness to the fubsy kind.)

* Battery-powered cars can be made waaay cheaper than gas-powered cars.

* Battery-powered cars could in theory be cheap to operate. Cover your garage, not even your house, in solar collectors, don't use a lot of electricity around the house, and stockpile charged-up batteries.

* Battery-powered cars could be made so hip the newspapers print the short list of celebrities waiting to buy one, the way the Post marketed the Prius in Washington twenty years ago.

* Battery-powered cars are as close as humankind has ever come to perpetual motion. The sun will eventually burn out but it's not likely to happen in our lifetimes.

But as far as warming is concerned...if the same number of people drive the same number of miles in battery-powered cars, that's still a lot of friction on pavement and heat reflected off glass and metal. The question for Musk thus becomes whether he wants to reverse confirmed local warming, or sell cars. If the former, he might do better to focus on the health benefits of walking and the improved efficiency of working from home. Battery-powered cars are a nifty notion but, in order to reverse the warming effect, they'll still need to be driven much less than gas-powered cars.