Pun Salad

Back in December 2022, I saved a link to this WIRED article from one Bill McGuire: El Niño Is Coming—and the World Isn’t Prepared.

Yes! Be afraid! Be very afraid!

The subhed doubles down:

Global heating will set the stage for extreme weather everywhere in 2023. The consequences are likely to be cataclysmic.

Any specific predictions, Bill?

The actual record, according to Wikipedia, is 56.7 °C (134.1 °F), set in 1913, in Death Valley. There's some dispute about that, though, and Wikipedia goes on to say that the next-highest record is closer to Bill's number: 54.0 °C (129.2 °F), set in 2020 and 2021, also in Death Valley.

But no, the record was not broken in 2023, let alone "shattered." Anything else, Bill?

That didn't happen either.

Even alarmists know when to hedge their bets with "might", "tends", "could". As late as August, Ars Technica noted that NOAA was still trying to scare us: After slow start, NOAA predicts rest of hurricane season to be “above normal”.

What actually happened? NOAA got the named storms and hurricane numbers right! That's not too surprising, given their generous uncertainties. But as far as landfall goes…

Kind of a snore.

But Slashdot notes that some folks got hot and bothered: 2023 Will Be Remembered as the Year Climate Change Arrived. Quoting a WaPo story:

Again with the unpreparedness!

I'm not a total skeptic. Things are getting warmer, and that's due to greenhouse gases. But I'm tired of the alarmism.

Also of note:

• Meant to post this yesterday, sorry. Jonah Goldberg isn't buying the hype: New Year’s Kiss-Off.

  Let me offer an early Happy New Year!

  Now with that out of the way, let me forthrightly declare that New Year’s is the worst “holiday”—and it’s not even close. Say what you will about the most familiar holidays imposed on us by Big Greeting Card, they actually celebrate things worth celebrating. Fathers! Mothers! America! The Star Wars franchise (okay, that’s a close call given Jar Jar Binks and Ahsoka)!

  What is New Year’s celebrating? The turning of a page on a calendar. We made it another year! Of course, that’s true every day if you start the countdown 365 days ago. Well, that would be arbitrary, you champions of annualized crapulent bacchanalia might say. Look, I’m all in favor of looking for reasons to have a drink. But let’s be honest, it’s a new year everyday just as much as it is always 5 o’clock somewhere.

  Oh, heck, that's right! I forgot to put up my 2024 calendar! Just a minute… OK, now I'm back.

  Kevin D. Williamson is also an unbeliever: At the Crossroads.

  Whereas Thanksgiving is a Christian holiday disguised as a secular one, New Year’s remains true to its pagan roots—alongside Halloween, which has turned into something of a heathen cultural juggernaut, it is our most obviously pagan festival. We owe the date itself to Julius Caesar’s calendar reforms, which moved the date of the new year from the Ides of March to January 1 and the patron of the celebration from the war god Mars to the two-faced Janus, the much more ancient personification of beginnings and endings. Knowing the calendar adds a little richness to the story of Caesar’s assassination on the Ides of March, the most political day of the Roman year, the day on which new consuls began their terms, with the Romans counting their years from one consulship to the next in roughly the same way later Europeans counted their years from the coronations of their kings. Assassinating Caesar on the Ides of March was profoundly conservative in its symbolism: Caesar’s tyranny was of a piece with his contempt for Roman mores and tradition.

  […]

  Janus, who lends his name to the first month, is not one of those fancy Greek gods repurposed by the Romans. Janus is an old local, probably borrowed by the Romans from the Etruscans, an adaptation of their two-faced god, Culsans. And while there is much about the classical Greco-Roman world that is very strange to us—Zeus and Athena and all those characters—that which lies on the far side of it in history is positively alien: the old weirdness. 

  Jeopardy! fans will read that last paragraph and mutter "Those darn Etruscans!"

• Woo-woo alert! Jerry Coyne notes a disturbing, or hilarious, trend: The supernatural invades American museums via indigenous artifacts. He quotes an article from Elizabeth Weiss, The American Museum of Supernatural History.

  We all remember when Fundie Christians got "Intelligent Design" to take equal billing with Darwinism in the science museums… oh, wait, that never actually happened. But:

  In the past two decades, science institutions have faced challenges from another source: indigenous religions. Unlike Christian fundamentalist beliefs, these indigenous beliefs often receive enthusiastic support from academics, scholars, and mainstream media journalists. This support might stem from a desire to oppose Western civilization and align with the “victims” of modernity as part of an effort to “decolonize” museums. Alternatively, it may also be linked to a trend of virtue signaling, which has allowed the misconception that “indigenous knowledge is science” to take root in academic circles.

  I recently reported on this trend in City Journal, discussing New York City’s American Museum of Natural History’s Northwest Coast Hall. One exhibit features a display case with a warning label about the “spiritually powerful” objects contained in the case. This exhibit blurs the line between fact and fiction by presenting creation myths as history. It also asserts that artifacts are imbued with spirits that release “mist” visible only to elders, implying that the objects should be repatriated.

  Also see: our favorite UNH physics prof, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, on an ancient observatory, on Hawaii's Mauna Kea:

  For example, when we talk about astronomy on Maunakea in Hawai’i, we often talk about how the seeing on the mountain is good. By that we mean there is less atmosphere at the high altitude, which means that it’s easier to get a clear picture of the sky without atmospheric interference. We know about this particular location not because of European or American exploration but rather because Native Hawaiians had for centuries known it as a place to observe their own cosmology, including a connection with the father of the sky, Wākea. Native Hawaiians, also known as kānaka maolior kānaka ‘ōiwiin their language, ‘Ōlelo Hawai’i, had a cosmology that was partly created through observing the sky at what British astronomers came to agree were valuable observing locations, for example, the top of the Maunakea volcano. In the end, I see the continuous use of unceded Hawaiian sacred spaces for Euro-American science without the permission of kānaka ‘ōiwi as an example of using Indigenous knowledge to produce science without crediting Indigenous knowledge: kānaka knew the seeing was good on the Mauna. When kānaka maoli welcomed European and American guests into their lands, they also shared information about their culture, history, and geography—including about their pristine view of the night sky.

  We wouldn't have known that Mauna Kea was a good spot for telescopes if the natives hadn't told us.

  And also see Robert Zimmerman for a less patient take on a recent development: Navaho Indians attempt to claim ownership of the Moon, delay Vulcan launch.

  The president of the Navaho Nation has asked NASA to delay the first launch of ULA’s Vulcan rocket because it carries ashes from a number of people (none who were members of its tribe) that Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander will place on the Moon.

  The remains are a payload purchased by the company Celestis, which offers this burial option to anyone who wishes it. On this flight that payload includes a wide range of ashes, including many actors and creators from the original Star Trek series.

  As Rand Simberg comments: "So they want to claim a body on which no member of the tribe has set foot, based purely on the fact that they’ve been looking at it for centuries."

• I'm growing fond of Warbyisms. From Our postcolonial trash needs taking out.

  What is a Marxist? Someone for whom no amount of mass murder and tyranny will stop him worshipping the splendour in his head.

  Fact check: true enough.

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