In the movie Father of the Bride Part II, Martin Short’s wedding coordinator character Franck Eggelhoffer encounters George and Nina Banks (played by Steve Martin and Diane Keaton) outside their pediatrician’s office. Delighted to learn that both the Banks and their daughter are having a baby, the colorful Eggelhoffer offers to plan the shower.
“No more parties!” replies an exasperated Steve Martin, who was comically and financially challenged by Franck in the first film. “Not this time. No way. N. O.”
“Every party has a pooper, that why we invited you!” Eggelhoffer and his side kick, Howard Weinstein, begin to sing. “Party pooper! Party pooper! Every party has a pooper, that’s why we invited you, George Baaanks!”
This scene comes to mind as we kick off the summer of 2024, and as such publications as The New York Times leverage a current heat wave to try and advance their belief that a man-induced climate crisis is threatening our very existence. They’re the party poopers Franck is warning us about.
“Well Beyond the U.S., Heat and Climate Extremes Are Hitting Billions,” headlines the Old Grey Lady.
Dig into the story and you read that 6.3 billion have lived through “at least a month” of “abnormally high temperatures.”
In other words, most of the people on earth have encountered a summer heat wave.
Writing last summer in National Review, Alex Epstein, author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels and the founder of the Center for Industrial Progress, acknowledges the earth is slowly warming – but claims that it’s becoming dangerously hot are just not true. He offers these four reasons:
- Cold-related deaths > heat-related deaths
- Earth is warming slowly, and less in warm places
- Fossil fuels make us safer from dangerous temperatures
- Anti-fossil-fuel policies increase the danger from cold and heat
In fact, Epstein pointed out data published by Bjorn Lomberg in The Lancet that warmer temperatures are saving 166,000 people every year since it means the cold isn’t as cold as it once was.
Happy people see a romance to summer, its warmth making family and friend gatherings easier and more enjoyable. Radical activists see it as a threat to life itself.
“Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language,” wrote the author Henry James. William Shakespeare expressed a similar sentiment when he observed, “Summer’s lease hath all too short a date.”
Radicals, though, are in a constant state of agitation, looking to fabricate and manufacture something out of nothing. Never wanting to let a seeming crisis go to waste, you’ll likely notice a rise in “climate scare” stories each time the mercury goes up.
And come summer, you can be sure the temperatures will do just that – even to sweltering levels.
But don’t let the radicals ruin the joy of this glorious summer. Sit in the sun. Savor the beach or pool. Take a swim. Go out in a boat. Go fishing. Sit on your porch and read. Take the kids camping. Barbeque, play ball, take a walk, go for a bike ride.
Make memories even while the alarmists try to make mischief.
As we read in Genesis, we need not fret about the ever-changing nature of weather.
“As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.”
Happy summer from all of us at Focus on the Family and The Daily Citizen.
