Heat Wave: Climate or Weather?

  

                                   

 

Yesterday, July 19, I turned 84. In all my years I do not recall a July that has not been hot. Heat in July is a natural weather phenomenon that occurs every year. However, headlines are making dire claims about global warming and quoting politicians calling for emergency action. It is totally unreasonable and unscientific to confuse or equate weather and climate.

Changes in weather occur routinely every year and range from summertime heat to below zero in winter. It is perfectly normal for temperatures to climb into the 90s during the summer. It is not a sign of global warming. It takes centuries to really notice changes in climate.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, temperatures have been tracked in New York City’s Central Park. Here, for example, is a list of the highest temperatures recorded at the start of each decade since the beginning of the last century

2021—98 degrees

2011—104 degrees 

2001—103 degrees

1991—102 degrees

1981—96 degrees

1971—96 degrees

1961—97 degrees

1951—94 degrees

1941—98 degrees

1931—99 degrees

1921—96 degrees

1911—100 degrees

1901—100 degrees.

 

The highest temperature recorded was on July 9, 1936. The thermometer hit 106 degrees that day. I know that the figures above are just a statistical snapshot, but they do illustrate that it is supposed to be hot in July and August. Looking at the figures, the only real difference over the past 100 years is that we have done something about the weather. Air-conditioning, one of the greatest inventions of the twentieth century, has revolutionized life in this country.

Our homes, offices, factories, shopping centers, theaters, arenas, and churches are  comfortably air-conditioned.  Actually, without air-conditioning our modern way of life would be unthinkable. We owe it all to fossil fuels which have provided the electricity that powers every air-conditioning unit. I am old enough to know what it was like to live without air-conditioning and it was not nice. I still think of my poor mother who gave birth to me in July. 

 

Anyway, weather is not climate. As noted above, weather goes through normal annual cycles, but climate cycles can take centuries to detect. Recently, studies have claimed  that the global temperature has increased by 1.1 degree Celsius since the nineteenth century, and that the increase is due to human activity in the industrial age. I can imagine that today scientists using modern technology can measure global temperatures, but I do not understand how they can come up with figures from over 100 years ago. 

 

Moreover, modern climate studies admit that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to factor in the effect of volcanic or solar activity in calculations of global temperature. Some believe that solar activity like sunspots are a significant factor in climate change. After all, the sun is our furnace. 

 

But let’s assume that the studies are correct, and that global temperature has increased by 1.1 degree Celsius since the nineteenth century. Rather than disaster, it has coincided with the greatest period of human development and prosperity in history. Although headlines carry stories of heat related deaths during the current heat wave, deaths from heat have decreased dramatically over the past century. Deaths related to cold are five times greater. Starvation and malnutrition as a cause of death has also reached all-time lows in the past century even considering the well-known man-made starvation efforts in Communist dominated countries. 

So even if the global climate is changing it might not be such a bad thing.  Our planet has been around for over 13 billion years. It has gone through every imaginable catastrophe during that time. It revolves around a large star 93 million miles away which is itself located on the periphery of a huge galaxy which is moving rapidly through the universe. During my lifetime, this planet has probably carried me millions of miles away from where it was in 1939. 

Human beings  have been around less than 50000 years on this planet. We certainly have the ability to make our lives better or worse but to think we can save Planet Earth seems to me the height of arrogance. In 1933 composer Irving Berlin wrote the song “Heat Wave.” In 1958 composer Cole Porter wrote “Too Darn Hot” for his hit musical “Kiss Me Kate.” Both songs referred to wickedly hot weather like we are experiencing today. Since these songs were written, human ingenuity used air conditioning to do something about the weather. But I suspect that our efforts to deal with climate change will do little good and potentially much harm to life on our planet.

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Sixtieth Wedding Anniversary

 

Circumstances kept my wife and I from celebrating our sixtieth wedding anniversary earlier this year. The day just slipped by quietly for both of us. Fortunately, our children combined to host a wonderful family gathering this past weekend. Below is a post that I wrote two years ago on the occasion of our 58th anniversary. It was entitled "A Fine Romance." 

We were married at St. John the Evangelist Catholic church in White Plains, NY on February 9, 1963. 

We originally met about two years before on a blind date. I was a senior at Fordham College in the Bronx thinking of going on to graduate school to study and eventually teach History. She was a nursing student at Cornell University on pace to get her BSRN the next year.

Both of us were unattached. I had broken off with a girl I had dated for months and wondered if I would ever find the right girl. She had also parted ways with a recent boyfriend. I guess that is why a friend of mine at school asked his girlfriend at the nursing school to find me a date so that the four of us could attend the annual Fordham glee club concert.

Maybe because I was Italian, his girlfriend thought of Linda Gardella. When she couldn’t find her, she asked a friend of Linda’s if she thought Linda would be interested. “Of course,” she answered without bothering to even ask her. Linda was a little upset but did agree to go. I guess that’s how fate operates.

Anyway, in those days men were not allowed entrance to the nurses’ quarters. I had to give my name to a receptionist who would let Linda know I was there to pick her up. On this occasion she was already ready in the lounge, a kind of waiting room. I can still see her now. I don’t know if it was love at first sight but not only was I struck by how beautiful she was, but by how mature she seemed to be. 

I think the first date was kind of a flop. The glee club concert was a major affair for the school and held every year at New York’s City Center, not far from the nursing center on the East Side. The concert was on Friday evening, March 3, but even though the chorale was premiering a new piece, the only thing I remember was that Linda fell asleep during the concert. In those days nursing students actually worked in the hospital wards and she had had a busy day. I don’t recall how we got back to the nursing center. I dropped her off and that was it. There was no holding hands or good night kiss.

Nevertheless, it was a start and despite my shyness, I got up the nerve to call her up and ask for another date.

As an aside, there were no cell phones in those days. There wasn’t even a phone in my grandparents’ home where I lived. I used pay phone booths that could be found on street corners. Any fan of Superman will be familiar with them.

She agreed to go out with me again and we began to date. In those days New York City was a wonderful place for a budding romance. Quiet bars (the drinking age was 18), coffee shops, and neighborhood restaurants were everywhere. Movie houses, theaters, and concert halls were nearby, and inexpensive. You could get seats for a Broadway play for less than $20 and half price tickets were readily available to students. Central Park was a short walk from the nursing center, and the lovely East River walk was around the corner.

In that beautiful spring of 1961, we held hands for the first time while watching “The Days of Thrills and Laughter” at a local movie house. We kissed for the first time one night in Central Park by the Lake. I had certainly fallen for her, and unbeknownst to me, she told her mother that she would probably marry me. 

Nevertheless, when summer vacation came, she went back to White Plains and while she didn’t exactly break it off, she went incommunicado. I’m still not sure of the reason. I was so despondent that I even grew a beard. 

After a couple of months, I was finally able to get through to her and she agreed to see me again. Persistence paid off. Of all places, I took her to Belmont Park, one of New York’s premier racetracks. Guys in my neighborhood in Queens loved the races, and I had become a little bit of a fan myself. Fate took a hand again. I had a couple of winners and was able to take her out to dinner at a nice restaurant back in White Plains.

After that we were a couple. I guess all she needed was time and space to make up her mind. In the meantime, I had graduated from Fordham, and had been accepted in the graduate program at Columbia University. She still had a year to go in nursing school. We dated regularly, wrote incessant love letters which she recently burned, and began to plan for the future.

 Shortly after she graduated in 1962, I proposed and she accepted. Of course, I went through the formality of getting her father’s permission. By then he knew I was not really a gambler. Years before, in Catholic elementary school the nuns had us open up a savings account with a local bank. I think we would deposit a nickel every week. In 1962 I took the little more than $200 life savings that I had in the account and bought a diamond engagement ring from a jeweler in New York’s Diamond district on 47th Street. Maybe, I got taken but she still wears it 60 years later.

It has been, and still is “a fine romance.”

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Independence Day

   

                                        

I concentrated on eighteenth century British politics in my brief academic career more than 50 years ago. In the process I came to realize the importance of British politics for a true understanding of the American Revolution. The American colonists regarded themselves as Englishmen defending their traditional rights as Englishmen. Basically, they believed that government should be as close to the people as possible, and not in some faraway capitol. Below find a brief analysis of the Declaration of Independence.

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Every July 4 we celebrate Independence Day, the anniversary of the promulgation of our famed Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. Most of us have heard the famous opening lines of the document, 

“We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

However, few have ever read the entire Declaration and even fewer have any understanding of the nature of the actual grievances that led the colonists to sever their ties with England and seek independence. Most readers don’t get past the following words.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

King George III of England was one of the nicest, most benevolent rulers that England ever had, but the Declaration portrayed him as a tyrannical despot. However, the real conflict between England and her American colonies was not between Monarchy and Democracy but between the rights of the British people represented as they were by their own Parliament, and the rights of the American colonists represented as they were by their own colonial assemblies. In this conflict no one was a greater supporter of the rights and authority of the British Parliament than the King.

For the most part the Declaration of Independence does not complain about violations of individual human rights but concentrates on what it claims has been a systematic attempt on the part of the government in England to violate the rights and privileges of colonial representative assemblies. 

The founding fathers believed these assemblies that represented the leading citizens and property owners in the various colonies were the sole bulwark against monarchical tyranny on the one hand, and democratic anarchy on the other. They claimed that the King and his colonial governors had repeatedly refused to put into operation laws passed by these assemblies.

•He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

•He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operations till his assent should be obtained…

•He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature…

•He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

In some cases the English government has even gone so far as to dissolve some of these representative assemblies and leave particular colonies without any form of self-government. The legal system, military defense, and tax collection have been taken out of the hands of the colonial representatives. Here are some examples:

•He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

•He has made the judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

•He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

•He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies, without the consent of our legislatures.

• He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power.

In the end the Declaration claimed that it came down to a contest between their own local representative assemblies and a faraway legislature that did not represent them. Because they had come to deny the authority of the British Parliament, they never used the word Parliament in the document. 

There are elements in the Declaration that might seem offensive to modern ears. Jefferson and others in America opposed the efforts of a reforming British government to permit religious toleration of the large Catholic population in newly conquered Canada. For them Catholicism went hand in hand with despotism. The Declaration also complained about attempts on the part of the British government to prevent colonization of Indian territory. Indeed, it claimed that England was encouraging the native tribes.

Nevertheless, the leaders assembled in Congress insisted on their rights as Englishmen to govern themselves. They wanted government to be as close to home as possible. They would make their own laws, vote their own taxes when necessary, and be responsible for their own legal and military systems. They did not want to be governed by a faraway government that had little concern for their interests or welfare.

It was true that the founders were men of property and status. Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, and Franklin were not common men. Democracy would come later. For the present they wanted to protect their right to self-government. The British government had declared itself “invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.” To resist, they were prepared to risk all that they held dear.

•“And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”  ###