This fun, contributed by reader Ralph David Westfall, features Winston Smith, protagonist of George Orwell’s 1984. Obviously, global warming/cooling/climate change/weather is not strictly an ID issue. Humans are designers and we could, of course, wreck a designed world. But is that really happening? Popular science media are not much help. Many elements of the popular controversy remind us of the dance of the tenure bores around Darwinian evolution. – O’Leary for News
Winston Smith corrects minor errors in Time‘s 1974 Global Cooling Article, guided by his newfound love for Big Brother (as recounted by George Orwell, 1984)
Winston Smith authored the following. It is the first draft of a corrected version of Time Magazine‘s June 24, 1974 article entitled “Another Ice Age?” He updated it as part of his work at the RecDep of the Ministry of Truth (Minitrue). The impetus was Big Brother‘s grave concerns that publicity about the malreported original article was perpetuating oldthink against the concept of global warming among the proles.
A similar article was published the following year by Newsweek. However the author of the latter has since come to understand that “2 + 2 = 5” and recanted (mea non culpa?) of what in retrospect he realized was crimethink. Although not getting around that much anymore, he is still occasionally seen at the Chestnut Tree Cafe.
Since it has not been possible to get a similar recantation from the author(s) of the Time Magazine article, Smith was assigned to rectify it. Although Smith had himself been guilty of thoughtcrime, he is being allowed to reform himself in this way through the gracious mercies of Big Brother. He received this second chance following his heartfelt expressions of renewed love for Big Brother as an outcome of his rehabilitation in Room 101 of the re-education facility operated by the Ministry of Love (Miniluv).
Smith was given the task because of his plusgood skills, as noted by Orwell, with “delicate pieces of forgery in which you had nothing to guide you except your knowledge of the principles of Ingsoc and your estimate of what the Party wanted you to say.” On the other hand it wasn’t that much of a challenge, since just globally replacing the characters in “cool” and “cold” with those in “warm” took care of a lot of the discrepancies.
Note that the upsub of this initial draft involved peer reviews by recipients of the Lenin Prize at the Trofim Lysenko Institute located in Oceania’s “perpetual” ally Eurasia. Although the reviewers liked the overall effect, they said it would be necessary to add “man-made” and “anthropogenic” to the wording multiple times to make it acceptable.
Feel free to use the Responses area below to suggest corrections, revisions or missing (but necessary) fill-ins where indicated in square brackets below. If you do so, please adequately document the basis in your comments. Big Brother appreciates your assistance in his efforts to eradicate all thoughtcrime.
And be sure to participate in the daily Two Minutes Hate sessions which will be dedicated to vilifying crimethinkful climate change deniers. The upcoming Hate Week will also focus on them, especially on Emmanuel Goldstein who, among his other “crimes against the Party,” is the leader of the “deniers.” “Death to the traitors!” “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.”
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Another Ice Age? A Desert Planet!
In East Africa, the worst drought continues for the in sixty th consecutive years, was adding terribly to the toll of famine victims. During 1972 2012 record rains in parts of the U.S., Great Britain, Ireland, Nigeria, Pakistan and Japan China caused some of the worst flooding in centuries. In Canada’s wheat belt, a particularly chilly and rainy hot and dry spring has delayed impacted planting and may well bring a disappointingly small harvest. Rainy Britain Oregon and Washington, on the other hand, has have suffered from uncharacteristic dry spells the past few springs. A series of unusually cold warm winters has gripped the American Far West, while New England and northern Europe have recently experienced the mildest winters within anyone’s recollection.
As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number an overwhelming consensus of scientists are beginning to suspect is absolutely certain that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval. However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler hotter for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age catastrophic global warming.
Telltale signs are everywhere —from the unexpected persistence melting and thickness thinness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward northward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest. Since the 1940s 1980s the mean global temperature has dropped increased about 2.7° F. Although that figure is at best an estimate, it is supported by other convincing data. When Climatologist George J. Kukla of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory and his wife Helena [need to replace] analyzed satellite weather data for the Northern Hemisphere, they found that the area of the ice and snow cover had suddenly increased decreased by 12% in 1971 2004 and the increase decrease has persisted ever since. Areas of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, for example, were once totally free of any covered with snow in summer; now they are covered free of it year round.
Scientists have found other indications of global cooling warming. For one thing there has been a noticeable expansion of the great belt of dry, high-altitude polar winds —the so-called circumpolar vortex—that sweep from west to east around the top and bottom of the world. Indeed it is the widening of this cap of cold warm air that is the immediate cause of Africa’s drought. By blocking moisture-bearing equatorial winds and preventing them from bringing rainfall to the parched sub-Sahara region, as well as other drought-ridden areas stretching all the way from Central America to the Middle East and India, the polar winds have in effect caused the Sahara and other deserts to reach farther to the south. Paradoxically, the same vortex has created quite different weather quirks in the U.S. and other temperate zones. As the winds swirl around the globe, their southerly portions undulate like the bottom of a skirt. Cold Warm air is pulled down across the Western U.S. and warm cold air is swept up to the Northeast. The collision of air masses of widely differing temperatures and humidity can create violent storms—the Midwest’s recent rash of disastrous tornadoes, for example.
Sunspot Cycle. The changing weather is apparently connected with differences in the amount of energy that the earth’s surface receives from the sun. Changes in the earth’s tilt and distance from the sun could, for instance, significantly increase or decrease the amount of solar radiation falling on either hemisphere—thereby altering the earth’s climate. Some observers have tried to connect the eleven-year sunspot cycle with climate patterns, but have so far been unable to provide a satisfactory explanation of how the cycle might be involved.
Man Human beings, too, may be somewhat are unquestionably responsible for the cooling warming trend. The University of Wisconsin’s Reid A. Bryson [replace] and other climatologists suggest are convinced that dust and other particles CO2 released into the atmosphere as a result of farming and fuel burning may be blocking is causing more and more sunlight from reaching and heating of the surface of the earth.
Climatic Balance. Some All reputable scientists like Donald Oilman, chief of the National Weather Service’s long-range-prediction group, think agree that the cooling warming trend may be only temporary will continue. But And all agree that vastly more information research funding is needed concerning about the major influences on the earth’s climate. Indeed, it is to gain such knowledge that 38 ships and 13 aircraft, carrying scientists from almost 70 nations, are now assembling in the Atlantic and elsewhere for a massive 100-day study of the effects of the tropical seas and atmosphere on worldwide weather. The study itself is only part of an international scientific effort known acronymically as GARP (for Global Atmospheric Research Program). [add some filler to maintain page length]
Whatever the cause of the cooling warming trend, its effects could will be extremely serious, if not and ultimately catastrophic. Scientists figure that only a 1% decrease 10% increase in the amount of sunlight hitting CO2 in the earth’s surface atmosphere could tip the climatic balance, and cool heat the planet enough to send it sliding down the road to another ice age becoming a desert planet within only a few hundred years decades.
The earth’s current climate is something of an anomaly; in the past 700,000 years, there have been at least seven major episodes of glaciers spread warming over much of the planet. Temperatures have never been as high as they are now. only about 5% of the time. But there is a peril more immediate than the prospect of another ice age runaway global warming. Even if temperature and rainfall patterns change only slightly in the near future in one or more of the three major grain-exporting countries—the U.S., Canada and Australia —global food stores would be sharply reduced. University of Toronto Climatologist Kenneth Hare , a former president of the Royal Meteorological Society, [need to replace] believes that the continuing drought and the recent failure of the Russian harvest gave the world a grim premonition of what might happen. Warns Hare [name]: “I don’t believe that the world’s present population is sustainable if there are more than three years like 1972 2014 in a row.”
*****
“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
If it’s been a long time since you read Orwell’s prophetic 1984, you might want to read it again. The parallels with the present world are uncanny. But stay out of range of the two-way telescreen while reading it, to avoid arousing the suspicions of the thinkpol (Thought Police), which could get you sent to a joycamp.
“Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
But currently the necessary organizational and mechanical infrastructure (e.g., memory holes) is not yet in place to track down and replace all existing copies of malreported published materials. Pending the full implementation of the revolution, it is still necessary for Big Brother’s loyal followers to attempt to discredit such materials with whatever tactics they think might be effective. Let’s see how many can doublethink themselves away from the implications of the narrative and step up in fluent duckspeak in the Replies. Mark Frank?
1984:
Couldn’t resist this: