Eric the Blue

Sometimes, when Trump shits the bed, it’s kinda fun to switch over to Fox News to see who’s pinch-hitting for the befouled king, maybe a humanities professor at a small liberal arts college “near San Francisco” with unusual views about . . . something. Today, the leader of the free world went on an unhinged social media rant about a golf course he wants to build in D.C., with a detour into the plague of algae at the mall’s reflecting pool, which he’s still blaming on Far Left Vandals armed with mysterious powers that include, it seems, expertise in biological engineering –the algae, he now says, is “criminally made.” I’m sure the people put off by the attention he’s devoting to algae mitigation and the construction of his golden ballroom will be happy to hear a golf course is in the works, too.

The Twins and their shaky bullpen were nursing a 1-run lead in the late innings, so I did not switch over to Fox. I did bring up on my phone the URL of the Power Line blog, to see what’s newsworthy in the world according to the authors of that unintentionally amusing site. Not, predictably, their president’s heated preoccupation with ephemera, but, somewhat to my surprise, since it raises the issue of climate change, the heat wave in Europe. The author, John Hinderaker, quotes approvingly a fellow winger who says temperatures of 36 degrees Celsius in the UK mean it’s time to drill for more oil in the North Sea, before proceeding:

I wondered: how hot is 36 degrees C? I was surprised to see that it is only 96.8 degrees Fahrenheit. That is hot, to be sure. But where I live, in the northern US, not the southern, that is a pretty common temperature in the summer. In fact, the forecast for Monday where I live in Minnesota is a high of 98 degrees. When I was a kid growing up in South Dakota, summer temperatures in the 90s were common, and occasionally the thermometer soared over 100 . . . .

Not sure what point he’s trying to make, but I also live in the northern US–which, as Hinderaker helpfully points out, is not the southern US–and, since his description of the local weather seemed to me a little off, I can now report that, going back to 1891, there have been more than 60 years in which the single hottest day in Minneapolis had a high temperature of 96 degrees F or less. So I don’t think it’s accurate, strictly speaking, to say that 96.8 degrees “is a pretty common temperature in the summer” where Hinderaker lives, in a suburb of the Twin Cities: in almost half the years, there’s not a single day it’s been that hot. According to the Internet, Hinderaker was born in 1950 and grew up in Watertown, SD, so I’ve checked out the hottest day of the year in Watertown, 1956 to 1968, which I’m guessing coincide with the years he attended school there. In 9 of those 13 years, the hottest day was less than 100 degrees F. Maybe he should have said that “very occasionally the temperature soared over 100, [and those handful of days made a strong impression on me.]”

I guess his point is that it’s always been hot in the summer and therefore it’s no surprise, and certainly not evidence of climate change, if it’s hot in Europe late in June. But in that case what to make of the half-cocked geography lesson with which his column begins:

Sometimes it gets hot. Even in Northern Europe, currently in the midst of a heat wave. Many people don’t realize that London is farther north than anywhere in the contiguous U.S. It is at the same latitude as Calgary, Canada. Paris is at the same latitude as North Dakota and Montreal. So Northern Europe has not generally been home to high temperatures.

If Northern Europe has not generally been home to high temperatures, and now it is, maybe that’s a sign that human activity is causing the climate to change? The paragraph is odd in other ways. It’s true that Calgary and London are at the same latitude, but it’s weird to say that a city (Paris) is at the same latitude as a state (North Dakota) that’s more than 200 miles in its north-south dimension, corresponding to more than 3 degrees of latitude. Since Paris is at 48.86 degrees north latitude, and the 49th parallel is the border between North Dakota and Canada, virtually all of North Dakota is south of Paris. Paris is also considerably farther north than Montreal, which is at 45.5 degrees north latitude. It’s almost as if Hinderaker doesn’t know what he’s talking about.