It has been a cool and rainy spring. Cooler than any I can remember. Which means we’ve been hearing a lot of one of the more irritating comments bandied about locally whenever it is unseasonably cool: “More evidence of global warming.” Paul Douglas ran a gutsy forecast in the June 10 Strib (no longer online, as best as I can discern) where he specifically called out a guy who greeted him with such a salutation.

Douglas, who has never taken the easy way out by hiding his beliefs on this strangely controversial topic, pointedly explained that weather and climate are different things, and it could be snowing this Independence Day and global warming would still be irrefutable because climate is the broad view of years and years of data. Weather is the current season.

I know most conservatives hate environmentalists and anything that portends organized efforts of obligatory social responsibility (I don’t deny that many conservatives act responsibly on an independent basis), but the willful stupidity of looking at today’s weather and making statements about climate change is simply too dumb to countenance. And everyone from Dave Dahl to Joe Soucheray to every other conservative on KSTP-AM thinks it’s funny or convincing (and apparently it is).

What’s funnier to me is how the oil economy is going to subvert their denial and inaction. The cost of driving and burning fossil fuels has spiked to the point that it represents a greater threat to our economy than subsidizing research and rewarding conservation. The great motivator for the average American, who sides with the deniers out of pure selfishness and obstinance, is the gradual depletion of their buying power.

Climate change is suddenly a trauma that may be cost effective to deal with. Who doesn’t want more efficient cars, lower airfares, and more money to spend with Comcast? The climate change deniers may be right in the end—that we were not causing it—, but they are more likely a loud but ignorant minority, and it’s going to get tougher and tougher for them to convince Americans that doing nothing is going to make their current lives any better.

As a great Minnesotan once said, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

I was at the Getty Center in LA last weekend, the architecturally stunning museum complex high in the mountains overlooking the city. The friend I was there with noted that his mother, upon first viewing the expanse of galleries, gardens, and grandiosity, suggested the money should have been spent on the homeless. It’s hard to even offer a response to that level of reductive thinking. 

Until you read about the newest mishap with the Space Shuttle. In case you missed it, yet another liftoff debris encounter has punched a gash in the heat shields that is so severe that NASA fears it may burn up on reentry without a spacewalk repair, perhaps even with one.

The Space Shuttle seems to be the latest embodiment of American idiocy and impotence right now. Something so badly thought out that it can’t function without frequently grave consequences and waste of life and human energy. Something of so little apparent utility that we have no intention of designing new ones that work properly. Yet something we just won’t give up on.

I won’t go so far as to say the whole manned space program has been a giant waste, but I’m open to persuasion. And you do wonder, as with the Iraq war, what higher purpose could have been achieved with the billions of dollars, millions of man-hours, and handful of lives that have been sacrificed for a program that devotes much of its in-flight time to assessing and repairing damage brought on by inherent design flaws.

Most of us pay so little attention to NASA and these “routine” flights that there is no public outrage or sense of national shame. Can our government and its retinue of outsourcing partners do anything right anymore? Or are we destined to pour billions and billions of dollars down various rat holes in the interest of satisfying the whims of politicians for whom there is no fact as compelling as the religion of manifest destiny?