Winter Wonders: Part Two
Last week I wrote about the lethal peril to which we find ourselves subject as the result of anthropogenic climate change and two of its perniciously wayward children, bomb cyclones and weather whiplash. Well, just when you thought it was safe …
Last week, the Washington Post ran a story — “This weather phenomenon on Lake Michigan stunned meteorologists Friday” — that’s sure to keep us on Red Alert until the vernal equinox, at the very least. Get a load of this:
An extremely localized but intense band of lake-effect snow … [dropped] nearly three feet of snow in a narrow swath only a few miles wide. Travel was halted as roadways became buried, with near whiteout conditions. But there was something a little special with this particular snow band — it was made up of more than a dozen wintry whirlwinds. These whirlwinds are known as mesovortexes (spelled mesovortices in academic literature). They are small eddies about 10 or 20 miles wide and akin to tiny low pressure systems. Each one locally intensified snowfall and was separated by a small moat or cutoff.
Meteorologists were baffled at first as to the cause of these mesovertices. But instead of blaming all of humanity for causing this climate-change phenomenon, a group of intrepid authorities managed to trace the cause to two men — Wilbur Pilkingbush and Herman Scroggins — who were cooking Coho Salmon they’d caught ice fishing on Lake Michigan over a wood-burning campfire out on Big Sable Point near Ludington State Park.
According to Ernest Grimlak of the Michigan Division of Forestry and Wildlife, “Them two dudes had a fire so big it threw off enough CO2 to sustain photosynthesis in the entire Huron-Manitee National Forests. Man, we can’t have that. We gotta spend millions of taxpayer dollars to build CO2 recovery plants and put that shit back in the ground so it can make more coal. The last thing we should do is trust nature to take care of itself, right?”
And that, of course, brings us to the Edmund Fitzgerald.
Weather or Not
While it hasn’t been definitively attributed to mesovertices, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald was an American freighter that went down in Lake Superior on November 10, 1975, taking the lives of all 29 men on board. Gordon Lightfoot wrote the commemorative song, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”, in December of that year. The record label, Reprise, released the song in August of 1976. It hit number 1 in Canada. In the United States, it reached number 1 in Cashbox and was number 2 for two weeks in the Billboard Hot 100. Nevertheless, there were some factual inaccuracies in the lyrics of the song, particularly here:
In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed
In the Maritime Sailors’ Cathedral.
The church bell chimed till it rang 29 times
For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald.
Historians and scholars of ecclesiastical architecture pointed out no Maritime Sailors’ Cathedral exists. More troubling, though, was this: The church bell chimed till it rang 29 times for each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald. If the church bell had chimed 29 times for each man, it would have chimed 841 times [29 x 29 = 841]. Grammarians and linguists were inclined to write that off as a slip of the tongue … well … pen, an oversight, an inadvertent overlooking of the arithmetic, or — less likely — some degree of illiteracy on the part of Gordon Lightfoot. For what it’s worth, I don’t buy the illiteracy theory. Lightfoot was much too accomplished a student of language and music to be judged illiterate.
Metallurgists and physicists, however, had more significant issues with the physical reality of the lyrics due to the potential effects of fractal vibrations. According to the Journal of Sound and Vibration:
A wide class of systems in nature and engineering consists of self-similar fractal structures, where each cell repeats the structure of the previous one on a certain scale. However, the well-known B. Mandelbrot’s fractals that use the scaling of geometric parameters do not reflect the dynamic properties of the system well enough. Therefore, when studying the system dynamics, it is suggested [but no one knows by whom] that structures which have a scaling of dynamic, parameters, should be considered as a special class of vibratory system. Such class of structures where stiffness and inertial parameters change with the same scale factor from cell to cell can be called dynamic fractals. Research has shown that such structures have a number of specific wave and vibrational properties. Thus, the dynamic fractal is equivalent in terms of frequency to a certain periodic structure, which is a band-pass filter. It has been also shown [but no one knows by whom] that the dynamic fractal having a scale factor greater than one with increasing magnitudes of stiffness and inertial parameters along its length has good vibroisolation properties. The main advantage of such a lattice is intensive vibration attenuation in all frequency ranges including in resonant modes of the lattice, which favorably compares with periodic lattices. On the contrary, the dynamic fractal having a scale factor less than one with decreasing magnitudes of stiffness and inertial parameters along its length has the properties of amplifying the incoming signal along the structure, which can be used in control systems.
In layman’s terms, that means were the bell to have been the same age as the nonexistent building in which it was hung, it would have been subject to fractal vibrations so deleterious they would have shattered had it been rung more than ten times, let alone 841. The metallurgists and physicists who studied the bell were bummed. But when Al Gore and the IPCC assured them if fractal vibrations hadn’t caused the bell to shatter climate change would have, they felt instantly better.
All’s Well That Ends Well
Here’s the deal, kids: No matter what happens, no matter the nature of the disaster, the calamity, the aberrant phenomenon, or the accident — and notwithstanding the plausible, practical explanations for any of that shit — attribute it to climate change. If we do that, if we stay unfailing allegiant to the narrative, the good news is we’ll be good. The bad news is we’ll be enslaved by the globalists.
But what the hell. It’s only life, and we only live once. We might as well be gullible and subservient.
Originally Published on https://www.bizcatalyst360.com/category/lifecolumns/notes-to-self/
