The Climate Change Change

We’ve heard it all before. Climate Change causes war and famine. Supporters of Climate Change legislation have scared us with all the plagues of Egypt for years, to trying to liberate us from fossil fuels. It’s actually been linked to every Biblical catastrophe, short of a rain of frogs.

So It should come as no big surprise that Discovery News posts this article linking “Climate Change” to wars, political unrest, famine, and generations of humans almost an inch shorter than their ancestors. (That’s a new one actually. Perhaps the oceans aren’t really rising; maybe we’re all just getting a lot shorter.)

But if you read the article a little more closely, you’ll notice something peculiar. The climate change the author is warning about here, isn’t global warming, it’s global cooling. According to the article, scientists writing for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences have compared historic records of famine and wars, and population, against temperature records. They have found that the cooler the planet gets, the more frequent the wars; during the warm periods, people stop fighting, and go home to make babies. Hence, warming periods coincide with population surges.

For the first time in recent media history, all the calamities listed have occurred when the Earth got colder. Consequently, a warmer climate is actually good for humanity. It’s what I’ve always suspected. Warming is much better than cooling.

Cold people are angry and bitter. It’s why people flock to the warmer parts of the earth on vacation, because everyone there is more relaxed. Actually they’re too relaxed. People who live in the proximity of palm trees have a tendency to spend inordinate amounts of time drinking tequila and rum based cocktails, and limbo dancing. It’s why all the important business is done up North, the cold makes people work harder.

We all suspected something fishy, when the press started using Climate Change as the new term for Global Warming. Many assumed, it was because the Globe wasn’t warming at all; especially last winter, after we shoveled our driveway for the eleventh time. I wonder if all the political fighting today is because the planet is cooling again. Maybe the Occupy Wall Street Protestors are so angry because the planet is getting so cold. But on second thought, I suspect when it starts getting really cold, they’ll all go home to their mother’s basement.

By switching the name of the crisis to Climate Change, the Green industry was able to profit regardless which way temperatures went. It seems that the media is getting ready to revert to the dire warnings of the Seventies, back when the popular fad was the beginning of a human induced Ice Age.

This is a twist that would have won a citation from George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, as double speak double plus good. Global Warming goes down te memory hole, and now we’re at war with te Cooling (and always have been). I wonder what else can be described in these terms: We could report on a story about guns leading to lower crime with the headline: “Gun Control Laws Proven to Change Crime Rate”; or explaining away the dire economy with: “Obama Stimulus Directly Connected to Change in Poverty Rate.”

It is also something that we all should be alert to. By calling it Climate Change, scientists will never be wrong. Change is a great Weasel Word. The President used it quite successfully in 2008; and three years into the change, we now know it isn’t always for the better.