A high school dissident takes on global warming

Burning earthBack in October, I wrote about one of my children’s classmates at high school.  This kid is handsome, athletic, and extremely popular.  He also made disparaging remarks about Obamacare and illegal aliens without getting push-back from either students or teachers.  Such is the power of popularity.

That kid’s at it again.  For his English class, he wrote an essay calling out anthropogenic climate change as a hoax.  I wonder whether his popularity will be sufficient to survive this dissident act, both socially and academically.

The young man’s brave stance got me thinking about the whole notion of unfalsifiable theories. As I explained to my own children, the normal way science works is that, if all your hypotheses prove to be false, you’ve established that your underlying theory is wrong.  Only in the world of climate change do a series of failed predictions and hypotheses serve as proof that your underlying theory isn’t merely true, it’s even more true!

Since I had climate change on the brain, when my daughter later pointed out that our little mutt, who had curled up in her lap, had buried his nose in her armpit, I exclaimed, “That’s because of climate change.”

Having said that, it occurred to me that it may be time to resurrect a college game with a twist.  Back in the day, whenever friends and I dined at a Chinese restaurant, when we opened the cookies and read aloud our fortunes, we’d add the phrase “in bed.” So, for example, a fortune that said “You will meet an interesting stranger” would be read as “You will meet an interesting stranger in bed.”  It was juvenile, but funny.

Nowadays, a variation of the game would be to response to any observation by saying, “that’s because of global warming (or climate change).”  So, someone might say, “Look, there’s a hawk circling your yard.”  And your answer would be “That’s because of climate change.”

“The furniture delivery man is running late.”  “That’s because of climate change.”

“My hair looks terrible today.”  “That’s because of climate change.”

“Does this dress make me look fat?”  “Honey, thanks to climate change, everything looks fat.”