Global Cooling--A Tall Tale
July 30, 2006 --from Stories Tall and Short

Why I can recollect, ye see, way back in the early part of the century. It was about 2010 somewhere around there, well, near as I can remember anyway. Ye see around that time there was all this talk of global warming. There was global warming this and global warming that. It got to be that was just about the main topic of conversation. If there was a hot summer then it was global warming. If it was an extra warm winter then it was--you guessed it--global warming. And if it was a cold winter, then that was somehow global warming too, kind of a rebound effect I guess it was. If the ice caps at the poles were melting then it was global warming did it. But if temperatures were cooling down in some area then that was due to a change in the ocean currents that was somehow caused by global warming.

Well, I bought into it just the same as everyone else did, and one Saturday a few of my neighbors and me, we got to talking.

“Why don’t we try to reverse the trend?” old Paul was saying.

“Yeah, and how would you do that?” I replied.

“Well, you just turn your refrigiator down real cold, then you turn your air-conditioner on full blast, then you get all the neighbors to do the same.”

“That’ll never work,” I said.

“Well, give it a try. You never know until you try.”

Well that got me to thinking.  Maybe there was a way to have an effect on global warming. We could call it global cooling. Maybe if you could set up a real cold area it would start to have an influence on the world as a whole.

Well, we tried it. I cooled my house off real cold-like. Some days we would leave the refrigerator door open for a while, just to see if we could get it colder in the kitchen. Old Paul, who lived next door, did the same thing. After a while we built an enclosed walkway between Paul’s house and mine, so that it was cold both places as well as in between. We started to call our little cold area “the cold zone.” With our air-conditioners cranked way up we sometimes had to wear our winter coats in part of the house.

Well, crazy enough, the idea caught on. A few neighbors started doing it. We kept the air-conditioners on full-blast in our cars. Seemed like we were always kind of cold, wherever we went to visit. We stayed indoors a lot just so we could be kind of immersed in the coldness. If we felt too cold we would just dress up warmer.

The idea kept spreading. We called it “the cold project”. And pretty soon we were sending flyers around and then we were a part of the “cold campaign”.  Next thing you know we had formed the Cold Party. Everything we did had to do with coldness.

After some time went by people started talking about how cold it was all the time. “Cold yesterday wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, and it looks like it’s going to be another cold one today.”

Now I don’t know if there really was such a thing as the “cold effect”. I don’t know if it’s possible that an area of cold can really kind of self-perpetuate or breed a larger area of coldness.

But it just seemed like, in our little town anyway, people were talking as if the cold was something that had just kind of set in for good, and there wasn’t any way to stop it. Was it all the air-conditioners or was it maybe the ozone hole that was letting in cold air from outer space? Or was it maybe the growing coldness in people’s hearts--not as much love for our neighbors anymore?

“Cold breeds cold,” a lot of folks were saying. It turned out that we had some real cold winters and there wasn’t much denying that we had entered a cooling trend. The Eskimos were having trouble breaking though the ice to do their fishing. Icebergs were interfering with shipping. Next thing you know people had forgotten all about the global warming idea--and it had all switched over to global cooling and the coming ice age. Some folks blamed it on the big department stores, trying to sell all those winter clothes and blankets. Others blamed it on the sheep-herders trying to up the market for warm woolly sweaters. Others thought it was the fault of Dow-Corning and their insulation business.

Whatever it was there seemed to be no turning back the cooling trend that had set in.

One afternoon I saw Old Paul out by the alley. He didn’t seem to have aged that much, though the years had been whizzing by. Paul had a handcart and on the cart was his old air-conditioner. “Won’t be needing this anymore, I guess,” said Paul. “Seems like the days are so cold, even in summer, there’s just no need for A/C anymore.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right Paul,” I replied. A couple weeks later I took my air-conditioner out and stored it in the shed out back, just in case.

A lot of folks nowadays don’t remember that we were once concerned about temperatures being too high. It kind of got lost in the shuffle, with all the other issues that came along. But I can’t help wondering--if it hadn’t been for us, Old Paul and the neighbors and everybody--if global warming might not have continued on and still been a problem to this day. Maybe it was the neighborhood action we took. Did we really bring about a change in the climate--cause a spreading effect of the cold? Or was it a spreading of the "idea" of cold that occurred. Maybe we’ll never know. But somehow it seemed that just taking up the project of trying to spread coldness in a warming world had a definite effect on changing the trend. Maybe that principle can apply to anything that needs changing or improving. You never know for sure, but as Old Paul said, “Just give it a try. You never know until you try”.

Mailing List Preferences, Donations, Etc.