Later this month, John McCain is going to be speaking in Seattle at an event cohosted by the Discovery Institute, an organization that has been behind a bunch of the Intelligent Design stuff. And so, predictably, a lot of advocates of Approved Thought have expressed their disapproval of this most recent outbreak of Disapproved Thought, and have done so in no uncertain terms.
In what may be an unrelated development, John McCain showed his loyalty to another form of Approved Thought, to wit, global warming. He was recently at some important forum or other, the closing statement of which was that global warming is now “beyond doubt.” McCain appeared to agree, saying that we were at a tipping point, and that Congress was going to act. Oh, good.
The thing that cracks me up about these things is the unabashed faith that people have in computer modeling, much of which enables us to speculate blindly at high rates of speed. We have the kind of faith that was on display in science fiction movies in the fifties, which is to say, that if blinking lights on computers were involved, then the results were approved by science. “Approved by science” is a subset of Approved Thought, which means, if you accept it, like a docile child, you need have no fear of losing your job or of reporting to reeducation camps.
How do these johnnies account for the Medieval Warming Period? You know, those centuries when Greenland got its name, and temperatures were, well, a lot warmer, and New York was probably not under 12 feet of snow. Since global warming (caused by greenhouse gases, to boot) is now “beyond doubt” and the expression of any skepticism on this point will cause me to be dismissed as one who is as dumb as a box of rocks, I have decided to fall in line. The Medieval Warming Period was not included in the current computer modeling, but I offer a way of incorporating this datum into the Undisputable Facts, which fortunately, Science (all rise!) has now Discovered.
What had to have happened was this. Since global war . . . global climate change, sorry . . . is something caused by man, and since the Medieval Warming Period is also beyond doubt, at least for people who can read, it follows, as night follows day, that this earlier stage of global climate change was caused by early Swedish snowmobiles. The Jutes had to have had them too, and the Geats, and the Danes. This thesis accounts for a much disputed line in Beowulf, where he raced his youthful companion across the ice. The verb can mean swimming, or rowing, but now, on the basis of computer modeling, we are able to translate it as snowmobiling.
Mediterranean historians did not record these developments because they didn’t know about them, and besides, if they did, they were no doubt in the back pocket of Parthian Oil. I mean, shoot, follow the money.