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During these days, the present Bishop of Rome has invited and is receiving a large delegation of Oil and Natural Gas producers for the purpose of refining approaches for the remediation of Global-warming-cooling-climate-change. Since the Bishop of Rome has proven to be a complete secularist, and liberation theologist practicing progressive, it is well that he should continue in that persona so as not to confuse us, The Unwashed.
Were your humble servant so disposed, he might remind His Holiness that he would be better served by studying weather and climate history as it pertains to the past 100 years or so. As we have pointed out on other occasions, my grandmother, Esther Lee Christian and my great grandfather, Peter Bonesteel Christian, lived in a community named Llano de Enmedio, State of Vera Cruz.
P.B. Christian had bought a 2,100 acre finca in the high hills and mountains of the very tropical Sierra Madre Oriental in the 1880s, and re-established the tropical orchards that had been producing oranges, mangoes, avocados, and various other tropical and neo-tropical bounties. He was an associate and stockholder in the company Washburn & Christian Mills in Minneapolis when that company was the largest milling operation in the world. It later reconstituted under the name General Mills which is a well known corporate title to this day.
For several years P.B. Christian and his daughter operated and enjoyed their little hideaway, and sent tonnes and tonnes of produce down the Pantepec River to connect with other transportation of the harvests, mainly to Mexico City. Some of the produce was shipped to Galveston and New Orleans as well.
My grandmother made several trips back to Minneapolis just to visit and keep relations fresh. She also made social inroads, particularly with one Mexican gentleman from Mexico City who was a buyer of quality tropical fruit for the Mexico City market. We have indications that the relationship was something formal and serious, but there was a tragic end when it was learned that the boy was murdered by bandits on the road back between Vera Cruz City and Mexico City. It was apparently quite a to-do in Mexico City because the family was well-known and highly regarded in that theatre.
The main reason I present any of this material for the OROGs and other readers is to reinforce that we know from whence we speak. During the progress of the 1890s, there were three different devastating freezes, at least two of which had the visit of abundant snow. The mighty and prolific orchards of the Christian family were degraded with each onset. By the third hard freeze, the finca (or hacienda) was reduced to being a place that could only hope to support a couple of crops of corn per year. Such farming could never justify the effort.
So, sadly, they packed their possession they cared to take back to Minneapolis into huge canoes and floated / rowed back down to Tuxpan, where they also had maintained a flat in a fancy district of the downtown, and while there booked passage on a freight and passenger steamer that connected Tuxpan with New Orleans. This would have had to have been in 1900.
From there they loaded up their possessions on the City of New Orleans limited express passenger train, and travelled up to Chicago, where they changed to the Burlington line for final arrival in Minneapolis...all done in less than a week.
Oddly enough, Peter Bonesteel Christian returned to the south, but stopping on the border...and helped establish the cities of Donna and Weslaco, Texas. He became actively involved in the real estate and farming business, including the venture into Valencia oranges and various types of grapefruit. Later, in the 1913 - 1916 period he managed to convince his son-in-law, Norman Newton, the husband of Esther Lee Christian to come down to the Magic Valley and buy some magnificent orchard and farming land!! There would be no more farming a thousand acres of wheat and enduring the six-month Winters of Gwinner, North Dakota. After all, the Magic Rio Grande Valley had a 400 day a year growing season, P.B. Christian would declare, only half in jest.
As best we can tell, no one, during those times suggested that there was "climate change" or any other such bilge. The Galveston Hurricane of 1900 was not pronounced to be a harbinger of "global warming", even if something between 7,000 to 12,000 people were killed in the event. No accurate count could be made due to the lack of a constant census and the presence of so many "world citizens" due to the workers in the docks...Galveston being the number one port for Texas at the time.
P.B. Christian had bought a 2,100 acre finca in the high hills and mountains of the very tropical Sierra Madre Oriental in the 1880s, and re-established the tropical orchards that had been producing oranges, mangoes, avocados, and various other tropical and neo-tropical bounties. He was an associate and stockholder in the company Washburn & Christian Mills in Minneapolis when that company was the largest milling operation in the world. It later reconstituted under the name General Mills which is a well known corporate title to this day.
For several years P.B. Christian and his daughter operated and enjoyed their little hideaway, and sent tonnes and tonnes of produce down the Pantepec River to connect with other transportation of the harvests, mainly to Mexico City. Some of the produce was shipped to Galveston and New Orleans as well.
My grandmother made several trips back to Minneapolis just to visit and keep relations fresh. She also made social inroads, particularly with one Mexican gentleman from Mexico City who was a buyer of quality tropical fruit for the Mexico City market. We have indications that the relationship was something formal and serious, but there was a tragic end when it was learned that the boy was murdered by bandits on the road back between Vera Cruz City and Mexico City. It was apparently quite a to-do in Mexico City because the family was well-known and highly regarded in that theatre.
The main reason I present any of this material for the OROGs and other readers is to reinforce that we know from whence we speak. During the progress of the 1890s, there were three different devastating freezes, at least two of which had the visit of abundant snow. The mighty and prolific orchards of the Christian family were degraded with each onset. By the third hard freeze, the finca (or hacienda) was reduced to being a place that could only hope to support a couple of crops of corn per year. Such farming could never justify the effort.
So, sadly, they packed their possession they cared to take back to Minneapolis into huge canoes and floated / rowed back down to Tuxpan, where they also had maintained a flat in a fancy district of the downtown, and while there booked passage on a freight and passenger steamer that connected Tuxpan with New Orleans. This would have had to have been in 1900.
From there they loaded up their possessions on the City of New Orleans limited express passenger train, and travelled up to Chicago, where they changed to the Burlington line for final arrival in Minneapolis...all done in less than a week.
Oddly enough, Peter Bonesteel Christian returned to the south, but stopping on the border...and helped establish the cities of Donna and Weslaco, Texas. He became actively involved in the real estate and farming business, including the venture into Valencia oranges and various types of grapefruit. Later, in the 1913 - 1916 period he managed to convince his son-in-law, Norman Newton, the husband of Esther Lee Christian to come down to the Magic Valley and buy some magnificent orchard and farming land!! There would be no more farming a thousand acres of wheat and enduring the six-month Winters of Gwinner, North Dakota. After all, the Magic Rio Grande Valley had a 400 day a year growing season, P.B. Christian would declare, only half in jest.
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| Not global warming or climate change. Just a common everyday, category 5 hurricane with winds of 195 mph and waves of 40 feet. |
As best we can tell, no one, during those times suggested that there was "climate change" or any other such bilge. The Galveston Hurricane of 1900 was not pronounced to be a harbinger of "global warming", even if something between 7,000 to 12,000 people were killed in the event. No accurate count could be made due to the lack of a constant census and the presence of so many "world citizens" due to the workers in the docks...Galveston being the number one port for Texas at the time.
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The following is a commentary from a true authority concerning the topic. The comparisons and analytics are marvelous.
Climate change is over. No, I’m not saying the climate will not change in the future, or that human influence on the climate is negligible. I mean simply that climate change is no longer a pre-eminent policy issue. All that remains is boilerplate rhetoric from the political class, frivolous nuisance lawsuits, and bureaucratic mandates on behalf of special-interest renewable-energy rent seekers.
Judged by deeds rather than words, most national governments are backing away from forced-marched decarbonization. You can date the arc of climate change as a policy priority from 1988, when highly publicized congressional hearings first elevated the issue, to 2018. President Trump’s ostentatious withdrawal from the Paris Agreement merely ratified a trend long becoming evident.
A good indicator of why climate change as an issue is over can be found early in the text of the Paris Agreement. The “nonbinding” pact declares that climate action must include concern for “gender equality, empowerment of women, and intergenerational equity” as well as “the importance for some of the concept of ‘climate justice.’ ” Another is Sarah Myhre’s address at the most recent meeting of the American Geophysical Union, in which she proclaimed that climate change cannot fully be addressed without also grappling with the misogyny and social injustice that have perpetuated the problem for decades.
The descent of climate change into the abyss of social-justice identity politics represents the last gasp of a cause that has lost its vitality. Climate alarm is like a car alarm—a blaring noise people are tuning out.
This outcome was predictable. Political scientist Anthony Downs described the downward trajectory of many political movements in an article for the Public Interest, “Up and Down With Ecology: The ‘Issue-Attention Cycle,’ ” published in 1972, long before the climate-change campaign began. Observing the movements that had arisen to address issues like crime, poverty and even the U.S.-Soviet space race, Mr. Downs discerned a five-stage cycle through which political issues pass regularly.
The first stage involves groups of experts and activists calling attention to a public problem, which leads quickly to the second stage, wherein the alarmed media and political class discover the issue. The second stage typically includes a large amount of euphoric enthusiasm—you might call it the “dopamine” stage—as activists conceive the issue in terms of global peril and salvation. This tendency explains the fanaticism with which divinity-school dropouts Al Gore and Jerry Brown have warned of climate change.
Then comes the third stage: the hinge. As Mr. Downs explains, there soon comes “a gradually spreading realization that the cost of ‘solving’ the problem is very high indeed.” That’s where we’ve been since the United Nations’ traveling climate circus committed itself to the fanatical mission of massive near-term reductions in fossil fuel consumption, codified in unrealistic proposals like the Kyoto Protocol. This third stage, Mr. Downs continues, “becomes almost imperceptibly transformed into the fourth stage: a gradual decline in the intensity of public interest in the problem.”
While opinion surveys find that roughly half of Americans regard climate change as a problem, the issue has never achieved high salience among the public, despite the drumbeat of alarm from the climate campaign. Americans have consistently ranked climate change the 19th or 20th of 20 leading issues on the annual Pew Research Center poll, while Gallup’s yearly survey of environmental issues typically ranks climate change far behind air and water pollution.
“In the final stage,” Mr. Downs concludes, “an issue that has been replaced at the center of public concern moves into a prolonged limbo—a twilight realm of lesser attention or spasmodic recurrences of interest.” Mr. Downs predicted correctly that environmental issues would suffer this decline, because solving such issues involves painful trade-offs that committed climate activists would rather not make.
A case in point is climate campaigners’ push for clean energy, whereas they write off nuclear power because it doesn’t fit their green utopian vision. A new study of climate-related philanthropy by Matthew Nisbet found that of the $556.7 million green-leaning foundations spent from 2011-15, “not a single grant supported work on promoting or reducing the cost of nuclear energy.” The major emphasis of green giving was “devoted to mobilizing public opinion and to opposing the fossil fuel industry.”
Scientists who are genuinely worried about the potential for catastrophic climate change ought to be the most outraged at how the left politicized the issue and how the international policy community narrowed the range of acceptable responses. Treating climate change as a planet-scale problem that could be solved only by an international regulatory scheme transformed the issue into a political creed for committed believers. Causes that live by politics, die by politics.
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Mr. Hayward is a senior resident scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
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