Climate Change: Apocalypse Now! Please!
By J. Christoph Amberger
As my business schedule ebbed and subsided toward the end of last week, I was able to combine my travels through Germany with visiting family -- and even a wedding. [...]
The day was warm, probably around 90 degrees. But if you heard the constant complaining of the wedding guests, you could have thought the wedding party was stranded on a downtown Baltimore concrete lot on a mid-August day wearing only paper napkins. The whining! The griping! Given that there is no self-respecting German who does not spend at least three weeks every summer roasting on Mediterranean beaches, trekking through remote Africa, or exploring Indonesia, the preoccupation with "heat" at home might strike you as slightly ridiculous.
But postwar Germans are keen on crisis. After living 40 years in the potential hot zone of the Cold War, peace and democratization of the East have left a void that needs to be filled. Accordingly, everyone in Germany has by now thoroughly convinced himself that he is experiencing the cusp of "climate catastrophe" firsthand. Right here. Right now.
My sister's boyfriend told an interesting story. He's a cameraman for a local news station. In May, a week or two of no rain had refreshed pop-climate theorists’ predictions of an immediate and instant "Versteppung" (turning into steppe) of the Mark Brandenburg, [the heartland of Prussia and in the former East Germany], as a result of the average American soccer mom's reckless driving of an SUV. He and his team were sent out to shoot pics of just how bad things are already.
Problem was, he found no steppe. He drove for hours and only found lush, green fields, forests and meadows, with multitudes of cranes and herons wading through well-filled waterways. He finally had to go to an agricultural institute to find yellow leaves on a test field that had to serve as irrefutable evidence that the Sahara is inescapably marching toward Berlin.
The next day it started raining...
By J. Christoph Amberger
As my business schedule ebbed and subsided toward the end of last week, I was able to combine my travels through Germany with visiting family -- and even a wedding. [...]
The day was warm, probably around 90 degrees. But if you heard the constant complaining of the wedding guests, you could have thought the wedding party was stranded on a downtown Baltimore concrete lot on a mid-August day wearing only paper napkins. The whining! The griping! Given that there is no self-respecting German who does not spend at least three weeks every summer roasting on Mediterranean beaches, trekking through remote Africa, or exploring Indonesia, the preoccupation with "heat" at home might strike you as slightly ridiculous.
But postwar Germans are keen on crisis. After living 40 years in the potential hot zone of the Cold War, peace and democratization of the East have left a void that needs to be filled. Accordingly, everyone in Germany has by now thoroughly convinced himself that he is experiencing the cusp of "climate catastrophe" firsthand. Right here. Right now.
My sister's boyfriend told an interesting story. He's a cameraman for a local news station. In May, a week or two of no rain had refreshed pop-climate theorists’ predictions of an immediate and instant "Versteppung" (turning into steppe) of the Mark Brandenburg, [the heartland of Prussia and in the former East Germany], as a result of the average American soccer mom's reckless driving of an SUV. He and his team were sent out to shoot pics of just how bad things are already.
Problem was, he found no steppe. He drove for hours and only found lush, green fields, forests and meadows, with multitudes of cranes and herons wading through well-filled waterways. He finally had to go to an agricultural institute to find yellow leaves on a test field that had to serve as irrefutable evidence that the Sahara is inescapably marching toward Berlin.
The next day it started raining...
posted by Oroborous at 8:46 AM
1 Comments:
The Germans are infamous for their eschatalogical panics. Martin Luther and his German cohorts kick-started the Reformation with their panicky appeals to an imminent return of Christ and the 1000 year rule of saints. Hitler roused the Germans to war on his prophecy of a 1000 year Reich. Now this.
Never trust a panicky German.
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