My liberal friends are always messing with the language. Locally, in our small town of Redmond, Oregon speed bumps are posted with signs saying Speed Cushion. Much nicer description. Might make the bang and bump of going over a ridge of asphalt easier. Not that I’ve found a speed cushion which actually “cushioned” the spring of my car. But we can find comfort from a friendlier use of a word that suggests softer.
Another example is the switch from “global warming” to climate change. Global warming was straight forward and very was easy to understand. Either the planet was warming or it wasn’t. But global warming didn’t happen as planned, and really couldn’t be explained away as going to happen later. Manhattan Island remained dry after 2020, and in fact isn’t really threatened by an Atlantic flood in the near future. The polar bear population increased in numbers and continues to thrive in the Canadian arctic. Recorded data and verifiable facts not withstanding, our global warming folks weren’t discouraged. No, they just decided t0 exchange global warming for the ambiguous phrase climate change.
I can imagine a wine and squash soup dinner where an inebriated diner said, “I know. We’ll call it climate change instead.” And so the climate change phenomenon came about. Not that the temperature of the earth warmed…and in fact may have cooled a bit.
According to the April 3, 2019 Bend Bulletin, March 2019 was the coldest March in Central Oregon in more than a century. I joked at the time that it was a fine example of global warming. Climate change deadheads didn’t disagree. They just dismissed the record cold as an anomaly, something that didn’t really happen. I mean, if we deny it, then there really wasn’t a record cold temperature to mess up the “facts” of climate change. (I’m sure I heard a weather guru call the recent January 2024 Arctic blast that affected the entire US and Canada an anomaly.)
And there they go again, messing with the English language. If the weather doesn’t fit the narrative of climate change, then it didn’t really happen. It’s just an anomaly.
There were no car wrecks, no one died of hypothermia, there were no power outages, and schools remained open. Glad to hear that, I think, because the refusal to recognize actual events exposes the end goal of my liberal friends. Their efforts are not about saving the planet. Rather their unsubstantiated claims are based on a fanatic need for control and domination of the citizens of the country, and perhaps of the world.
Rod
2024
P.S. In February 2021, NOAA reported the average contiguous US temperature was 30.6 F, 3.2F degrees below the 20th Century average. Ranked 19th coldest February in 127 years, and coldest February since 1989.