By any standard, the weather experienced by the East Coast since December has been, well, weird. What can you say when the weather is so odd that Easter was colder than Christmas. Surely, some terrible climate change – global warming – must be happening to cause such bizarre conditions.

On May 6 a famous New York City newspaper publisher wrote: “Tho’ we have had a very mild Winter, we have had the coldest and most backward Spring I think that ever I knew. There has not been but one warm Day properly speaking since the Month of February, and it is so cold now, that I am obliged to keep by the Fire: The Fruit I believe will be much affected by it.”

Such strange weather proves to everyone that we must change our lifestyles to save the planet from our excessive use of technology. Save the polar bears stranded on ice floes! We must junk our cars and use scooters instead, we must buy funny-looking light bulbs and . . . . Actually, you may think that something is peculiar about that quotation. Could a New Yorker huddle near a fire without risk of  harassment by  carbon dioxide watchdogs? And when was the last time that a New York journalist was worried about the fate of the local fruit crop?

The quoted letter was written on May 6, but the year was 1766, some 241 years ago. The journalist was not Bob Woodward but instead James Parker, publisher of the NewYork Gazette, or the Weekly Post-Boy, another New York paper that is no longer with us. And the letter was written to Benjamin Franklin. It was published during 1969 in volume 13 of The Papers of Benjamin Franklin.

Did global warming take place in 1766? Was it brought on by all the hot air generated by the anti-congestion plan of His Worship the Mayor of New York, John Cruger? Or, possibly, from the methane given off by all the cows in Manhattan? My personal favorite theory for the cause involves Franklin—his famous kite must have punched a hole in the ozone layer.

Maybe none of these things caused the unusual weather. Weather does tend to have patterns just as history supposedly repeats itself. It just took 241 years for that weather to repeat itself. Weird weather does not prove very much except that weather is, well, weird.

People should be cautious before they follow the pied pipers of global warming. A hot day in August means nothing. When I was in college, in the 1970s, scientists assured us that the weather was getting colder, an ice age was on the way, and we were all going to die. Thirty years later, scientists are telling us the weather is getting hotter, the Earth is going to be toasted, and we are all going to die. Skepticism, I think, is justified about wild claims based on peculiar weather.

Related Links

HNN Hot Topics: Global Warming in Historical Perspective

Bruce Bartlett: Climate History