August 17, 2014
Dan Sweeney
The Sun Sentinel

RE: “Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it” – Some comments on your unlinkable Page 1 news story about heat and cold in today’s Sun Sentinel.

Mr. Sweeney,

First, might you be named after Dan Sweeney, AKA “Snapper”, a WWI combat veteran who lived in Bayonne, NJ on East 26th Street?

A cherished Father’s Day gift this year was a dark blue ball cap emblazoned with gold letters proclaiming that the wearer is a “PROUD GLOBAL WARMER”. I hope this does not automatically label me a knuckle dragging, flat earth zealot. I’ll be devastated if it does.

Has anyone else noticed that UM Professor Ben Kirtman, doubtless a multi-degreed individual who is well respected in the Graves of Academe, has no sense of how History intrudes? Indeed, Clio can be a cruel companion.

He says “the warming since the 1950s is unequivocal”. In 1950 an English astronomer, Fred Hoyle, settled the science about the origins of the universe. “Steady state” was chiseled into the walls of every astronomy class in the known universe. Ah! The glory days of LP records, Willie, Mickey, and the Duke in center field in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn, and summers free of Salk vaccine.

I hope, as Professor Kirtman says, that “two plus two equals four – 100 per cent certainty” still holds. If he thinks Ptolemy got a bad rap all bets are off.

The conundrum here is that, despite the anti-intellectual, anti-rational nit-wit nostrums of over educated jackasses, Global Warming has been and will continue to be a good thing for mankind.

Follow the bouncing ball. I’ll type slowly.

Increasing temperatures make more land more arable. Arable land is the cradle, the nurturer of protein. Increased protein helps to make people smarter. 1100 years ago we had an uptick in temperature. 200 years alter we had the Renaissance. All those opposed to Dante and Michelangelo can leave the room. Just do it quickly and silently. Conversely, we had a “Little Ice Age” 200 years later. Whatever else it did it gave the wood to Stradivarius to make divinely inspired instruments.

Jeepers! The weather sure changes. And all that happened before we started to drown polar bears because of burning fossil fuels to give the rich 1% aggressive air conditioning.
Speaking of changing weather….

1821 was known as the “Year without Summer”. It snowed several times in Boston in June.
1908, 1925, 1938. Galveston, South Florida, and Long Island were leveled like when Noah was around.

How did this happen, there being far, far fewer automobiles, no summer ice skating, absolutely no fluorocarbons or long strand polymers? No one had ever heard of fracking and the Satanic Koch Brothers weren’t even born.

What caused them to happen? Stalin? FDR? Hitler? Which man made these things happen or did they just happen?

I think I’ll ask Professor Vivaldi, the noted Italian weather commentator. When he speaks it is settled.

Ciao.





Kevin Smith