the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, from Tennessee to New York, and all over New Jersey, Brood X cicadas have emerged out in full force. In 2004, billions of Brood X cicadas burrow underground with heavy hearts and prepare for the worst. Brood X, the Great Eastern Brood, is one of 15 broods of periodical cicadas that appear regularly throughout the eastern United States. It has the greatest range and concentration of any of the 17-year cicadas.
For Brood X cicadas Global warming was here! What should have been a happy 17 years sucking on roots and napping, was disturbed by tortured dreams of climate doom.
In 2000, climate scientists at Britain’s Hadley Center, with the peer-reviewed articles, told us that in twenty years snow would be “largely a thing of the past.” They told us heavy snow would be so rare we would be unprepared when it finally occurred. There would be “chaos.” So snow a thing of the past not so fast we’ve been setting records!
Climate Change : the theory that if you raise taxes the weather will be significantly impacted
The temperature of the Earth never rose the way climate models told us it would. When their warming predictions proved inaccurate, the folks who pushed them didn’t apologize, they changed the name! “Global warming” became “climate change.” Not frightening enough? Now it’s “climate crisis!” The man who claimed he invented the internet Al Gore even told us the Arctic Ocean would be ice free by 2014. Despite the skeptics Al Gore’s even received a Nobel Prize., yet time and again, boats that tried to navigate polar waters became trapped in ice , some were even threatened by “marauding polar bears.”
Polar bears have long been an unwitting poster child for climate change. There’s just something about a forlorn polar bear clinging to a melting iceberg that really tugs at the heartstrings—and the media knows it. For nearly two decades now, Time magazine in particular has relied on some variation of polar-bears-on-icebergs for its big climate change stories. (One cover from 2006 featured the iconic image with an alarmist headline: “Be Worried. Be Very Worried.”) That same year, Al Gore popularized the idea of drowning polar bears in his docudrama, “An Inconvenient Truth,” claiming that melting arctic ice would leave polar bears adrift at sea with nowhere to rest.
Polar bears, yes turns out there’s plenty of polar bears after all. While scientists don’t know exactly how many polar bears there are (they’re hard to count, as you can imagine) the global population is estimated to be around 30,000 and stable. One Russian extrapolation presented in 1956 suggested a number of 5,000 to 8,000, but that figure was never accepted by scientists.
Prince Charles, did we have a revolution in 1776 so we didn’t have to listen to this guy , who told us in 2009, we only had 100 months left to save the world. What did the heir to the British throne do when the clock ran out? He, like many others, moved the goalposts.
In 2019, Socialist bartender turned Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez told us we had only 12 years left to save the world. Funny when Brood X went underground in 2004, America was the bulwark of freedom standing against Socialism. Bernie Sanders was there, but he was an open apologist for the Soviet Politburo.
Now there’s Greta Thunberg, the 16 year old wonder kid from Sweden. She wasn’t even born the last time Brood X emerged. Greta skipped school, now she’s an expert? Greta refused to fly the Atlantic to get to a UN conference in America to protest petroleum and preach Socialism. She sailed across the Atlantic instead , but it turns out the boat was a high-tech carbon fiber racing yacht owned by the royal family of Monaco that was made from petroleum and natural gas.
Sea levels rise as ice caps melt ,sinking Pacific Islands? No such luck, sea levels have not changed very much and former President Obama bought a beautiful home on Martha’s Vineyards and thirteen new beach resorts have opened in the Maldives!
Extreme weather? Storms, floods, droughts, tornadoes, fires? Sure, they happen, but it’s all historically normal , we used to call it weather. Now even seasonal weather patterns are attributed to “climate change” along with everything from national security, immigration too Fed interest rate policy .
So now 17 years later Brood X is up and about, the weather’s fine, and the sounds of romance are in the air. While we’re certainly glad the climate catastrophes we were threatened with by the media never materialized and Brood X reminds us of man’s inability to to fully grasp the power of nature.
I haven’t seen one in Paramus yet