WASHINGTON: Vlad Lenin is supposed to have once said that a lie told often enough becomes the truth. A sentiment then parroted by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf. It’s hard to argue their point, given what passes for climate change news here in the Pacific Northwest.

June in Seattle can be a drippy affair.

Alternatively, at least it used to be. According to our governor, Jay Inslee, Western Washington is already in the middle of a drought. Meaning that, in normal Seattle-speak, it hasn’t rained for three days. In Jay’s panicked opinion, we’re locked in a heatwave so intense that it might be given disaster status.

This wild-eyed proclamation has come about because our normal average temperature for late spring is between 68 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit. It has rocketed up to 71.4 degrees over the past month.

Just wait till summer hits; holy wow, are we in trouble then.





Why August might find us in the mid-80s if we don’t do something to stop it.

The Seattle Times picked up on this drumbeat of silliness. On May 11 the Seattle Times printed a story about how climate change was responsible for the death of a 72-year-old pine tree located at the University of Washington Arboretum.

That article apparently wasn’t enough to send the masses screaming through the streets in directionless panic. But never let it be said that the Times is a publication that gives up easily.

Their recent headlines, “Climate change is killing our patients” and “Time for US Senate to take on climate change” are proof of their fortitude.

Trees routinely last longer than 72 years but assigning the charge of tree murder to climate change is beyond incredulity. Especially when we examine how much the climate has actually changed. It’s absurd to think that an increase of 0.6 to 1.4 degrees over the last century killed that tree—if that is, in fact, a legitimate figure.

It may not be, given how things are reported or ignored depending on agendas. The schizophrenic realities of the climate over vast periods provide an example.

During the Little Ice Age, from about 1300 to 1850, the canals of Venice, Italy, froze.

A few short years later the 1856 diary entry of a cavalry captain’s wife, living in the usually cool Bay Area, spoke of the weather being so hot that birds were falling out of trees, dead before they hit the ground.

Mrs. Slaughter termed it a “simoom” or a desert wind. Some of those trees the birds fell out of were probably pines and barring rampant development, some of them would doubtless still be there. So yes, the climate changes.

So yes, one of our local trees died. Maybe it was a flawed tree, an ill-treated tree, or perhaps a squadron of pine beetles found their way here from Montana, having wiped out that state’s last lodgepole pine and finding our tree to their liking.

However, it was one lone tree.

The remainder of its family remains in place, doing what healthy trees do—hosting squirrels, dropping cones, and dripping sap on parked cars.

That a commodity called “logic” has been systematically erased from this topic should be evident to any thinking person. It then becomes evident that the government and media believe that we no longer think at all. Thus creating fertile ground for deception.





However, assuming for a moment that our changing climate is the problem they insist it is, what is humanity supposed to do about it? Entirely stop the slightly more than one-tenth of one percent of the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide we’re guilty of emitting (0.117%, source: NOAA)? Plug up the over 400 active volcanoes and fumaroles that spew thousands of tons of CO2 twenty-four-seven (source: just about any geology text you pick up)?

Alternatively, should we tax ourselves for breathing? What-oh-what shall we do?

Think, that’s what. Study, analyze, engage our brains.

One might start with questioning the credentials of those spouting so much contrived “knowledge” about the earth’s processes. Somehow, I don’t think governors, or former vice-presidents, or newspaper columnists are the people we need to be hearing from on the matter.

So, let’s try geologists.

You don’t need a degree to pick up a library book or two on geology, where you’ll learn that the earth somehow managed to experience at least eight warming periods between ice ages, and it did this all by itself. This latest interglacial period began about 12,000 years before it decided to kill the Arboretum’s pine tree, a crime for which it has been indicted indirectly by one governor, and directly by at least one newspaper.

Your ancestors were in caves at the time. I suppose the fire they built for warmth and barbequing mastodon steaks might have contributed at least as much as one flatulent cow does in upsetting the climate, but how could they have known that what they were doing would lead to the death of our tree?

The Butterfly Affect

Of the things that affect a planet, the flapping wings of a butterfly pointed out by some person whose poetic license should be revoked. Cause nowhere near the turmoil the flapping jaws of the agenda-driven whip up. As already established, geologic reality dictates that this climate change stuff happened many times before we fell out of our epochs-ago trees. However, we are being told with increasing vehemence that are we are the cause of climate change.

We alone have the power to stop this planet from doing what it has done on its own for millions of years.

A public increasingly divorced from the use of learning and logic to dispel this garbage is the real danger we face. This scam is easy to see through with just a little independent thought.

The second Times article about a 2% increase in local hospital patients dying of severe heat events provides an example. It claimed this increase occurred between 1990 and 2010 and left it at that.

Mentioned nowhere is the fact that we’re dealing with more people—a lot more people. Seattle’s population during those 20 years swelled by 16%, an addition of nearly 100,000 new residents. Death is tragic no matter what the reason. However, a two percent increase in deaths pales to nothing when demography is added to the equation. It indicates improvement in personal environments and treatment.

Selling the public on specious ideas

Such blatant sensationalism, purposely avoiding cogent facts, doesn’t just sell newspapers; it sells ordinary people on specious ideas for whatever questionable goal those who perpetrate such nonsense might have.

However, then also missing in the article’s analysis is the number of senior people who leave Seattle’s supposedly sweltering climate to live in Arizona, trading our 1.4 extra death-dealing degrees for 118 in the shade.

If they can find any shade down there. Oh, and the author also chose to leave out our marvelous city leaders’ ignoring of those who wish to live, and do other things, on Seattle’s sidewalks.

How those folks are to deal with this climate crisis has yet to be told by our ever-concerned authorities. I’m just guessing, but the heroin use they at least appear to encourage might be thought of as a way of easing the destructive effects of climate change. Leaving city government and the Seattle Times free to wallow in angst over the death of a 72-year-old tree.

Sometimes the word “stupid” just isn’t strong enough to describe things.

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