In the epilogue of his final swipe at climate/weather hysteria, his novel State of Fear, author Michael Crichton brings up the eugenics fad of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Perhaps a spin-off from Darwin’s work, it had serious influence on Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, not to mention Adolf Hitler.  Franklin Roosevelt was also prone to believe in the intelligent influence of the human gene pool.  Forced sterilizations of the unfit ensued.

The late sixties and early seventies were a fertile environment for the cultivation of New Age nonsense.  Organic produce was all the rage, as was recycling.  Oh, yeah, that stupid stuff is still popular.  Fear is a great propellant for fad adherence, such as the concern over electrical and magnetic fields (EMFs) — what I call murder by electric blankets.

The term “holistic” entered the language, as did the pejorative reaction phrase “touchy-feely.”  A friend, who used to be a partner in a semi-rural medical practice, told me about a homeopath who hung up her shingle in his town.  He paid her a courtesy call, and she called him up shortly thereafter.  She had a patient whose problem she could not diagnose.  The problem turned out to be meningitis — a condition that should be treated with utmost immediacy.

Besides college campuses, corporate boardrooms are also welcome venues for fads to take hold.  Remember Bud Lite?  That used to be a popular brand.  Fads, you see, are popular beliefs that take hold in spite of empirical reality.  They achieve popularity largely through social pressure.  Humans are often influenced by conformity.  It can also be said that gullibility thrives on ignorance — the void created by a lack of knowledge is most easily filled by popular nonsense.

This brings us back to the weather/climate hysteria fad.  As summer once again begins, the media are agog over the onset of periods of warm-to-hot weather.  Occasionally, one of the news clones will let slip the phrase “high pressure dome” when warning the world about what really turns out to be normal weather.  Dogmatic adherence to weather hysteria has prompted adoption of the new term “heat dome.”  Nonetheless, rather than atmospheric heat trapping, high air pressure is the primary cause of warm-to-hot weather.  It’s called compression heating.  When molecules of air gases are packed more tightly together, the temperature increases.  The opposite happens when low air pressure is caused.  This is the essence of mechanical refrigeration.

Atmospheric heat trapping is especially important at night — otherwise, everything would freeze solid once the sun sets, just as it does on the airless Moon.  Also, in furtherance of dogmatic hysteria, we are now subject to an annual three-month heat wave formerly known as summer.

A little bit of further climate knowledge: for those of us in the northern hemisphere, considering the elliptical nature of the Earth’s orbit, we are farther from the sun in the summer and closer to it in the winter.  This may make conditions more mild than otherwise expected.  But what about the southern hemisphere?  Having more ocean versus land mass also modifies their effects.  Another factoid is that the west coasts of continents have milder weather than the east coasts.  Snow at sea level on the U.S. east coast?  Really?

And now for the mother of all fads: Marxism.  I like to say that a communist is nothing other than an angry socialist.  In addition to the socialist abolition of private property, communists are all hot and bothered over the perception of class struggle.  Wealth, to them, is unevenly distributed because of one form or another of inheritance.  This is, of course, inherent-ly unfair.  The seductive nature of the Marxist/socialist model lies in its promise of passive sustenance.  It is no longer necessary to struggle for survival; everybody is to be taken care of.  No problem.  In fact, radio rabbi Daniel Lapin has described the allure of Marxism as being akin to gravity.  One has to flap his wings really hard to resist its pull.

To a Marxist, the pre-communist world is rife with economic inequities.  In the real world, however, both sides of a transaction are expected to benefit.  An employer needs to have work done, and a worker needs to make money.  A renter needs a place to live, and a landlord needs to receive an income from his investment.  A merchant needs to sell off the inventory he’s already paid for — and a consumer needs to replace the goods he’s already consumed.  If a consumer doesn’t like what a merchant is offering, or the price being asked, he can go elsewhere — maybe, in a functioning market-driven economy.  But this give-and-take is anathema to Marxists.

They like control.  “We know what is best.  You do not have our depth of understanding.”  Talk about tyranny.

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