Climate Change Deniers and Heat Redistribution

Once, when the world was young, we lived in a rather large brick house in a rather small town in northeast Iowa. There was a fireplace in the living room. When it got cold, outside and in-, we sometimes started a fire in the fireplace. It was a way to try to warm the outside by pumping slightly warmer air up the chimney.

Early on in our life there, we took out the fireplace and installed a new, large wood stove. It is, I know, still doing winter duty, creating a warm spot in the world when the wind howls outside, and when the last thermal unit of heat has gone looking for refuge.
Midwest winters are not all about crystalline mornings and moonglow vistas. They are about dying in the cold. Huffington Post reports that, right now, with Polar air tumbling down over Canada to the Upper Midwest, there are 100,000 people without electricity in Canada. There will be thousands more, all the way to wherever the sea begins. It might be that most of them do not depend on electricity for heat, but even if they depend on coal, oil, or gas, when the electricity fails, other things begin to fail, too. An old-fashioned wood stove, pollution and all, seems at least a temporary comfort.

So here we are, burning coal, pumping hydrocarbons into the atmosphere in such quantities that it is goofing up the climate of earth itself, resulting in hot spots, hotter than ever, and colder-than-a-corncob-in-an-outhouse spots in other places: places like Manitoba and North Dakota and Michigan.

The only thing that is keeping climate change from happening faster than it already is, is the blather of people who don't see the problem. You could heat the schoolhouse with the hot air they generate. The plane still might slide off the runway, and the truck off the interstate, but the kids might stay warm. That's how climate change works: hots spots here and there; ice in the oceans; hurricanes along the coast.

I suppose we should be grateful for the idiots we have elected to office, and for the people who elected them. We should think of it as a redistribution of hot air.

Comments

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