| We start with a story about daisies, Henry Payne style. "These hardy, herbaceous perennials are grown for their bright white-petaled flowers with yellow centers," howled Staten Island Live reporter Lee Gugida in support of a rabid pro-daisy media bias. "The word 'daisy' originally came from 'day’s eye,' owing to its sun-like appearance — a yellow disk at the center surrounded by rays of white petals."
That was in honor of this morning's latest foray into "Is he crazy, or just stupid?" an exploration of the work of Henry Payne, which includes the following: "Climate scientists suggest that if you want a glimpse of some of the worst of global warming, take a look at U.S. weather in recent weeks," hyperventilated the AP's Seth Bornstein this month. "Horrendous wildfires. Oppressive heat waves. Devastating droughts."
He goes on, two paragraphs later, to use a summertime version of an old Henry Payne standard, the notion that unusually cool or cold weather somewhere on the planet exposes global warming as a communist plot. For those of us who live on Planet Earth, a quick recap of what's at work here: Global warming refers to a gradual warming reflected as global mean temperature (there's that global bit) caused by the increase in heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (the gas is the by-product of converting solid carbon to energy). This heat represents not just an increase in warm air, but an addition in heat energy into an atmospheric system -- weather and its long-term cousin climate -- designed to transfer energy to seek energy equilibrium (which, by the way, will never be totally acquired). The addition of energy to an energy-transfer system throws that system off track, inducing volatility. That volatility is reflected in higher-than-documented rates of extreme weather, trending towards warm weather events (since, you know, the global mean temperature is rising). That means global warming, a rising global mean temperature, will cause a greater incidence and more extreme heat waves, droughts and -- through a relationship anyone capable of fogging a mirror can figure out on their own -- wildfires. What this also means is that occasionally, there will be cooler-than-normal temperatures and even seasons ... kind of like the summer Europe is today having and kind of like our summer last year. This has been a basic primer in, "What is global warming, and why cool, wet weather in England means mostly just that it is cool and wet in England." |
