Whether the weather be fine,
Or whether the weather be not…

Can we please, for the sweet love of Jupiter thundering, endeavour to restore some sense of sanity, decorum and good olde inanity to our conversations about the weather? Take a step back, a deep breath and get a grip. It is, after all, just the weather.

Oh no, I hear you immediately clucking, if you’re not already too busy incessantly wagging your tongues, no, no, no, volubly scrambling to cancel me, my voice, my edu-cated opinion. It isn’t just the weather. Not anymore. Not like it was, back in your day, good sir. It’s different now.

It’s the… climate.

(Oh, shudder at the very word despite the fact we’ve been duly informed ad infinitum that we’re in the midst of a global warming emergency. Brrrrr! The inconsistencies and contradictions have only begun, dearest readers.)

Weather is weather. The same rain that fell upon Odysseus during his travails falls upon us now during ours. The sun shines as it has always shone, and best we make hay when it does in the immortal words of Cervantes. There have always been dark and stormy nights. Tempests toss’t.

Yes, but (Yeah, but in today’s parlance), the sputtering commences, this is different because—as if the snow that flies and the winds that howl over our beloved prairies could be somehow unlike the snow and wind that bedeviled our intrepid and implacable forefathers as they pioneered this country of ours into existence—the weather’s more intense, we’re told by rank amateur meteorologists. Meteorologists (imagine here a metaphoric spitting motion expelling sputum onto the floor to the left of me, as the old crones with their evil-eyes once did in their Umbrian hillsides.) As if it’s a science, meteorology. As if such a thing as intensity can be accurately measured.

That’s intense, duuuuuu-de.

Excuse my Bill and Tedding.

Shocked? This old goat’s not completely and utterly unattuned to today’s popular culture, he’ll have you know.

But the hurricanes are bigger! the kiddies bleat. The season lasts the longer. The rains and flooding are heavier. The droughts and wildfires more widespread. The heat. The heat is oppressive, unrelenting. The planet is on fire!

Well, which is it? Fires or floods? You can’t have it both ways. Nature doesn’t work like that. That’s a fact. Abhoring a vacuum, nature operates always in equilibrium. On average. Average rainfall. Average hours of sunlight. Average nighttime temperatures. On average. Sometimes higher. Sometimes lower. That’s how averages work, Archimedes.

And a ‘heat dome’?!

Please!

In my day, a ‘heat dome’, in jocular dorm room talk, referred to, using scurrilous demotic terminology, a phallus at the ready, PAR for short, although, hopefully not for long, knock wood.

Ahhhaha… Here’s to some misspent youth, what?

So egregious and overblown our humanistic belief system and overweening sense of self that we have truly convinced ourselves that we can control the weather! Talk about hubris. Such presumptuous arrogance can be traced back, like most of our current societal ills, to the 1950s and 1960s, the whole post-war experiment, and gullible parents of that sad age, instructed to free their infant children from any and all constrictions of the playpen. Let them roam loosey-goosey, unrestricted, unstructured, unregimented. No boundaries! No limits!

And how did it all turn out? Generations with an honest-to-goodness conviction that they can control the weather! Damn Dr. Spock straight to hell.

No one can control the weather, at least not since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Evil Empire. The Chinese may be up to something in that direction. If we’re looking for culprits to blame for our flooded grain fields and basements, perhaps we should be looking East, the Far East, the Inscrutable Orient. Is it mere coincidence that all this hue and cry about so-called ‘Climate Change’ emerged simultaneously with the rise of the People’s Republic of China from the direction, ironically, of where the sun sets to Western eyes?

Cause and effect, boys and girls, lads and lassies. Cause and effect. Good olde rigorous Newtonian science. Spare me your atomic particles and wave lengths and big bangs and thermodynamics and floating continents and your dark matter. Balderdash and poppycock. Humbug, I say, dear readers. Humbug.

Until you can look into these watery, sometimes rheumy, depending on the gout’s severity, grey eyes, eyes that bore deeply into those of Olive Diefenbaker to tell her frankly and forthrightly that it was time for The Chief to go, to look me right in the face and put forth a compelling case for anthromyopic climate change, not just your feelings and observations and opinions, until such a time, which I truly believe will never come to pass, can we please keep our conversations about the weather to the merely trite and cursory? Looks like rain today, sir. Is it hot enough for you, guv’nor? It’s windier out there than a Freemasonry’s roast, what? Simply to pass the time of day with complete strangers or those awkward moments when you’ve accidentally got on the staff elevator on your way to the billiards room.

Whatever the weather,
Whether we like it or not!