Camelot, Climate Hysteria, and Our Beautiful Backyard Flower Bed
What if it won't be a disaster as the planet warms?
It’s true! It’s true! The crown has made it clear
The climate must be perfect all the year.
A law was made a distant moon ago here. July and August cannot be too hot.
And there’s a legal limit to the snow here
In Camelot!
Until recently I believed that manmade global warming got its start in the university, the fertile ground for scores of bad ideas. But the play Camelot really began the Boomer Generation’s attachment to a perfect world regulated by the best and the brightest. Also, the 1963 assassination of John Kennedy destroyed the Boomers’ “political Camelot,” increasing their longing for the mythical kingdom:
The winter is forbidden until December
And exits March the second on the dot.
By order, summer lingers through September
In Camelot.
Camelot! Camelot!
In the seventies, Camelot of the mind seemed doomed by the coming ice age. Luckily, we swerved away from that unattractive movie-set disaster by the eighties when a slight upward tick in global temperature--due to solar activity (start the video at the 25 minute mark)--gave the Al Gore environmentalist camp the first cause of all causes and a more attractive brand.
Even though more folks die annually from the cold rather than the heat, the hellfire talk of world-ending global warming handed activists an attractive movie script and an endless supply of religious imagery. Ironically, most of the warming in the 20th Century occurred in the first half before the enormous increase in fossil fuel usage across the globe in the latter half of the century. Irony and comedy American style continues to die a slow death.
In 2022, Danish author Bjorn Lomborg publicized on Twitter a study on the greening of the planet showing semiarid areas increasing 15 percent in the last twenty years. That percentage equates to a land mass twice the size of the continental US. The added carbon dioxide in the atmosphere allows each plant to keep their pores mostly closed while ingesting carbon dioxide, preventing the loss of water; thereby encouraging strong growth and resiliency in drought conditions. Nature submits to King Arthur’s edicts!
Perhaps, we humans can bring about a bit of Camelot too with our continued usage of fossil fuels and encouraging the developing countries to tap their oil and gas reserves, making us a richer world of more people, more food and technological progress, and plenty of natural beauty.
Our flower garden of the last two years starts out with a dozen or so well-spaced salvia, dahlias, celosia, and pansies. Prompted by rain, sunny days and gobs of plant food, also called carbon dioxide, each humble plant within a month grows tall and bush-like, imitating a wild English garden.
My wife and I’d like to send out a big thanks to King Arthur and Lady Guinevere for finally fulfilling their promise of a Goldilocks’ weather pattern over our little neck of the kingdom.
The rain may never fall till after sundown.
By eight, the morning fog must disappear.
In short, there's simply not
A more congenial spot
For happily-ever-aftering than here
In Camelot.
