Essays in Idleness

Among the joys of winter, up here in the land God gave Cain (“Cainada”), are our glorious “cold snaps.” That is when temperatures, which we had naïvely thought insupportable, suddenly plunge. The breeze comes into this, too. I don’t know if readers in Bali, or Gabon, can fully appreciate what I mean by a “windchill” of minus 40 degrees. (Fahrenheit or Celsius: take your pick.) We’ve had a taste of this in Greater Parkdale recently. Too, a lot of snow. I am told that we are, moreover, sharing this “polar vortex” with much of the United States, and north-western Europe. It hasn’t shut up the global warmalarmists, but it has made them discernibly less strident, which I’m willing to count as a Christmas present.

Nematodes, I am reliably informed, can survive forty-plus weeks frozen at liquid nitrogen temperatures, then spring back to life, to resume their attack on your sheep. Who, unfortunately, cannot survive at liquid nitrogen temperatures. Nor can any other warm-blooded beast, as we are reminded in weather-channel videos that show wild animals desperately trying to break into our homes. (Don’t let them in. They’ll be polite, at first, but once they get comfortable, all bets are off.)

I am a little too proud, perhaps, of not being a nematode, yet envy such tricks as cryoprotective dehydration. The closest I can get is in my preference for whisky to water. That is not their only trick, as I understand, nor are the resilient bacteria one-trick wonders. The angelic engineers went to much trouble; alas, not all of them were on our side. But the nematodes do serve to remind that life may be harder to eradicate from this planet than alarmists suppose. Even we humans have tricks up our sleeves, though most involve “technology.” I am sceptical of our ability even to kill ourselves off, without God’s help.

Note that, for instance, despite the Devil’s best efforts, the world still contains Jews and Armenians. Could we take leave for a moment, and return to the planet in a couple thousand years, I think we would find they were still here; along with Catholics I am happy to say. I’m less sure about the rest. I think of the Zoroastrians — quite dominant in the Middle East for a millennium or two, then suddenly, quite gone. I give the anthropogenic global warming religion another decade at most.

Alternatively, the world will end at eight-thirty tomorrow morning (GMT).

By fire or in ice? … Whichever. … Those who have frozen to death are often found naked. This is because, below a certain temperature, the human metabolism confuses hot and cold. The exposed form the mad impression that they are on fire, so rip off all their clothing. But it wouldn’t have helped if they hadn’t.

According to the latest on “Zharkova cycles,” the sun has not one but two sub-surface magnetic wave components, both approximately eleven Earth years, but slightly fluctuating, and slightly offset. As they move together we get plenty of sunspots, and the Earth warms. As they move apart we get solar quiescence, and a cooling. Factor in longer-term wobbles in our orbit — for the next century or more we’ll be moving farther from the stove — and we may plausibly predict that our grandchildren will have something much like the cold of two centuries ago (which included 1816, “the year without a summer”). Too, that this adventure will begin memorably, around 2022, with a low tacked on a low.

But this is the work of odd, isolated hypothesizers (like Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, and so forth), working in defiance of the “settled science.” Indeed, show me a single advance in real science that wasn’t disrespectful of the “settled” sort, and I will show you some fake news. This latter currently costs us taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars, and relies on computer modelling that can’t even be sure if it will snow tomorrow.

Gentle reader may guess where the vested interests lie.