Dogwood Winter and Climate Change

I got up early due to an alarm-clock malfunction, so here is a pre-church post. We are due for a possible freeze Monday night. Yes it is April. Yes, our last average frost date is in March. Yes, that date is fairly meaningless around here. Our grandparents had knowledge of the weather that had to be carefully discounted by our educators for us to be re-educated in matters of "scientific" ecology, so that money can be extracted from us out of guilt for our existence, a.k.a. "excessive use of carbon". We are carbon-based life forms, after all. They knew that there would be many close calls and a few freezes between the blooming of the daffodils and safe planting time for sensitive plants. My grandfather finally got so frustrated with early spring warming causing his peach trees to bloom, then late frosts destroying the crop, that he bulldozed the orchard when I was a very young child. That's the risk of perennials. I remember peaches from a good year that seemed almost as big as my head. And I remember a grassy field at the back of the hill afterward.

They knew about blackberry winter, and dogwood winter, and other cold snaps when other things were blooming, that put crops at risk but could not be stopped. Farming terms and rainfall totals stopped being reported in local weather broadcasts when I was in my teens or early 20s. Now every drought, every flood, every snowstorm or heat wave or  "unseasonable" frost is "evidence" of "climate change". Perception of chaos in the weather is drilled into people who never go outside, except to get in a vehicle. Flooding in areas where people have traditionally grown 18-foot-tall varieties of rice is portrayed as unusual. Drought on a continent where many of the Caucasian explorers and initial settlers died of hunger and thirst if not assisted by the Aborigines according to the old stories (Australia- it was a penal colony for a reason) is seen as dreadful evidence that we are tipping the world into chaos. Umm, yeah. We had to be taught to disrespect old stories and people and ignore old books (after all, we're not taught good enough English to read pre-television sentence structures anymore) in order to believe what we are now told is "scientific fact-the debate is settled-DON'T LOOK OUT YOUR WINDOW!- DON'T ask the retired farmer in the nursing home down the street what's going on! just give us money for carbon trading and all will be forgiven!"

Yeah, they have some correct talking points. We may run out of easily accessible oil. We do use ridiculous amounts of energy for a lot of things. We have indiscriminately used horrible chemicals to do bad things to ourselves for the sake of convenience. Our grandparents were not stupid, and we have not "evolved" to be better and smarter than they, but rather have been culturally impoverished and rendered ignorant, cut off from their knowledge by a sense of technological superiority. I like to check some of the "doomer" sites sometimes, because they are collecting information about canning and homesteading that is quite informative. But their carte blanche acceptance of "global warming-oops, it is colder-climate change" gets really old. Sorry for the rant. Just amazed when otherwise seemingly sensible people accept political extortion as gospel.