Bryan Zepp Jamieson
November 19th 2024
Going clear back to the 1980s, the scientific community and millions of other educated people have been warning about global warming and its knock-on effects. For decades, people in the know have advised us that among many other things, warmer ocean temperatures combined with warmer air would result in bigger and far more destructive hurricanes.
Despite the gravity of the looming catastrophe, most people chose to simply ignore the warnings, a sense of denial bolstered by a coalition of filthy-fuel corporations and their fascist enablers in right-wing media, who assured their panting morons that “climate change” was just a conspiracy theory fostered by people who wanted us all to live in caves and hate capitalism.
To say that this caused a lot of frustration among sane people is an understatement.
An unforgettable example of this occurred as hurricane Milton was approaching Tampa Bay about a month ago. A Miami TV weatherman, John Morales, saw the numbers that suggested that the storm was undergoing “bombogenesis”–a sudden and large intensification. The phenomenon, not widely known twenty years ago, is a major factor in estimating the power and destructiveness of an approaching hurricane. Normally, a drop of 25mb in the central eye pressure in 24 hours indicates such a phenomenon is taking place. Milton dropped FIFTY millibars in that period, and Morales understood—and dreaded—the implications. He burst into tears over the damage to come.
Global warming means bigger, stronger storms. And a host of even more serious problems, but that was probably the easiest one to predict decades ago. And the American South has always been the area most vulnerable to landfalls from such storms.
So while Helene and Milton this year may have caused despair among climate scientists, they certainly did not cause surprise. And they’ll be the first to say it’s only going to get worse.
In fact, here in northern California, it’s just starting to snow this morning. A system is approaching the Oregon coast, and while not a hurricane, is developing similar intensity. The central pressure is expected to plunge about 40mb today, with central winds over 90 mph and waves in some areas 60 feet high. I’m 100 miles inland and at 3,300 elevation, and expect heavy snow for three days, and heavy rain after that. Nothing too extraordinary for us, but along the coast from the Bay area northward, it could have storm-of-the decade elements. Climate change didn’t cause the storm, but it does influence its power.
It’s not surprising that climate denialism—the refusal to accept that human emissions are having a major effect on climate world-wide—is losing popularity. When you get several storms-of-the-century or drought of a lifetime in the past decade, there is a dawning awareness that Something Is Going On Here.
Of course, this is the age of Trump, and so there’s no reason to suppose that dawning awareness is going to be constructive, or even sane.
Enter Veterans on Patrol (VOP). This outfit apparently actually did start out as a veterans advocacy group, but like so many elements in American life, it has been taken over by heavily-armed howling nuts from the far right.
Now, normal people, and by ‘normal’ I mean ‘not in the terminal stages of tertiary syphilis or convinced that their cat is telling them to assassinate Taylor Swift,’ actual normal people might assume that Helene was a pretty clear consequence of a hurricane supercharged by several trillion tons of greenhouse gases which might go where hurricanes frequently go and cause more damage than usual. Normal people might think that because, you know, normal.
But not our demented heroes of the VOP. A sample of their email conversations was in the Guardian today, and it read like this: “The US Military destroyed multiple communities and murdered hundreds by steering Weather Weapon Helene into Appalachia country, what should we do?” The answers offered were “Target military equipment and destroy the [directed energy weapons] easily accessible by the public”; “Destroy power and water lines that feed military bases”; “Locate all Top Brass bold enough to walk in public and detain them for murder”; “ALL 3 ABOVE”.
Well, that seems reasonable. After all, we all know from bad movies on the SciFi channel that one mad general, armed only with a black box the size of a shoe box and powered by a single D cell battery can steer a storm system 500 miles across and containing between 5 to 20×1013 watts of energy (200,000,000,000,000 watts) like it was a Hot Wheels toy and send it a thousand miles inland to strike Moscow.
Rather than accept that what happened is exactly what every climate scientist in the world has been warning will happen for debates, it’s easier to believe something that is nefarious, evil, sinister, and utterly demented.
But VOP has a constructive answer to this: “VOP News is openly requesting the public to provide the locations of all USMIC equipment used to control the weather. We intend to destroy this equipment in order to save lives.”
Yes, and Taylor Swift will be safe just as soon as we round up and kill any and all cats using mind control who don’t like Taylor Swift. What could be easier?
VOP is far from alone in this steadfast lunacy. Millions of Americans believe nonsense like this, and even zanier shit.
It’s not limited to America, or the twenty first century. In Europe in the thirteenth century, the Church hit on the notion that cats were evil and needed to be killed (“Kattenstoet”). The idea caught on, and most of Europe’s cat population was massacred. This allowed the rodent population, a favorite vector for the fleas that cause the plague, to explode.
There probably isn’t a culture on Earth without similar tales of mass idiocy, usually conducted with horrible consequences in their past and even their present.
Humans are all too frequently subject to conspiracy theories and similar idiocies. An uncharitable person might call them gullible, and I’m not feeling particularly charitable. They are gullible, and a lot of them are also mean and destructive and delight in the damage they cause.
The only solution is time, and sometimes even that doesn’t work. Ypres, Belgium, still celebrates Kattenstoet, although in a major victory for humanity and sanity, they now only throw plush toy cats off the belfry. See? Progress is possible, even if humans are involved.
But the madness will continue as America continues to lose its way. Climate scientists and even TV weather presenters get death threats from people who believe they are so intellectually superior they can envision D cell batteries steering hurricanes.
Oddly enough, no matter how many people they round up, the hurricanes will just keep on getting worse.
Obviously, Taylor Swift and the cats are behind that. Right?
