"We are not amused," Queen Victoria reportedly said when one of her equerries told a faintly naughty story during a dinner at Windsor Castle. There are other versions of the incident. Some say the queen's chilly rebuke was directed at a group of laughing ladies-in-waiting. Others say she was addressing a courtier who was involved with her daughter Louise.
Which brings me to the Federal Highway Administration and its attempt, in the spirit of the monarch for whom the Victorian Era is named, to see to it that Americans on the road don't find themselves more amused than our regulatory overlords deem acceptable.
The FHA recently released the 11th edition of its Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Streets and Highways. The publication, which clocks in at 1,161 pages, decrees that electronic signs on highways may no longer be funny, quirky, or clever. An Associated Press story provides examples of the kinds of messages Uncle Sam frowns on:
States around the country have used quirky messaging to draw the attention of drivers. Among them: 'Use Yah Blinkah' in Massachusetts; 'Visiting in-laws? Slow down, get there late,' from Ohio; 'Don't drive Star Spangled Hammered,' from Pennsylvania; 'Hocus pocus, drive with focus' from New Jersey; and 'Hands on the wheel, not your meal' from Arizona.
Earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal rounded up more illustrations. The Maine Department of Transportation had a Christmastime message for any driver with a lead foot: "Santa Sees You When You're Speeding." Wisconsin reminded motorists to stay to the right with a sign announcing "Camp in the Woods, Not the Left Lane." Another New Jersey messaging screen put it bluntly: "Reckless Drivers Are Worse Than Fruitcake." There was even blunter advice on Utah highway signs: "Get Your Head Out of Your Apps." And from Ohio's Department of Transportation, something truly hard-hitting: "Buckle Up — Windshields Hurt."
All this leaves the FHA unamused. On Page 519 of its new manual, it lays down an unsmiling directive:
"Messages with obscure or secondary meanings, such as those with popular culture references, unconventional sign legend syntax, or that are intended to be humorous, should not be used as they might be misunderstood or understood only by a limited segment of road users and require greater time to process and understand. Similarly, slogan-type messages and the display of statistical information should not be used."
Heavens, no. Messages "intended to be humorous"? We can't have that. Motorists might laugh, and then where would we be?
 Wicked good advice |
When Massachusetts highway signs started flashing "Use Yah Blinkah" in 2014, a Boston Globe editorial pronounced it "wicked good safety advice" and suggested that other states ought to "use humor to get a serious point across." Lots of states did. (Globe editorial gets results!) But the federal regulatory behemoth can't just leave it at that. To the bureaucratic blob in Washington, allowing a measure of fun to intrude on highway driving would be anathema. So there will be no unauthorized chuckling behind the wheel.
Unless, of course, some states decide to ignore Washington's dopey edict. How about it, Massachusetts? Fight for your right to be whimsical. Tell the FHA where to get off. Channel the spirit of your revolutionary forbears and let the feds know they can unplug "Use Yah Blinkah" when they pry it from your cold, dead hands.
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Climate change, then and now
While doing some reading this week I came across a description of the ongoing change in climate. It was written by one of America's most admired Democratic statesmen:
Snows are less frequent and less deep. They do not often lie below the mountains more than one, two, or three days, and very rarely a week. They are remembered to have been formerly frequent, deep, and of long continuance. The elderly inform me the earth used to be covered with snow about three months in every year. The rivers, which then seldom failed to freeze over in the course of the winter, scarcely ever do so now.
The political leader making those observations, I was intrigued to learn, was Thomas Jefferson. That passage appears in his "Notes on the State of Virginia," which he published in 1785.
The future president wasn't the only American intellectual in the late 18th century to tell of a warming climate. Samuel Williams, a professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at Harvard, described the phenomenon in 1794.
"The climate is perpetually changing and altering, in all its circumstances and affections," Williams wrote. "And this change instead of being slow and gradual, as to be a matter of doubt, is so rapid and constant, that it is the subject of common observation and experience." He claimed, moreover, that the change in climate was induced by human activity. It was being spurred by the establishment of new communities and the clear-cutting and plowing that went with it. By tranforming "uncultivated wilderness" into "numerous settlements," he speculated, farmers and builders were causing the earth to grow warmer and drier:
When the settlers move into a new township, their first business is to cut down the trees, clear up the lands, and sow them with grain. The earth is no sooner laid open to the influence of the sun and winds, than the effects of cultivation begin to appear. The surface of the earth becomes more warm and dry. As the settlements increase, these effects become more general and extensive: The cold decreases, the earth and air become more warm; and the whole temperature of the climate becomes more equal, uniform and moderate.
As it happens, Jefferson and Williams were wrong. Or at any rate, they never actually proved their case and were successfully challenged by yet another American intellectual, Noah Webster. Though best known today for his dictionary of American English, Webster was an important journalist who systematically gathered temperature readings using a thermometer. In two influential speeches published under the title "On the Supposed Change in the Temperature of Winter," he objected that Jefferson and Williams were basing their claims on anecdotes and supposition, not on hard data. In particular, said Webster, Williams's claim that the average temperature in America had risen by 10 or more degrees in the previous century and a half could not withstand scrutiny.
Webster didn't dispute that there had been some changes in climate. Rather, as Joshua Kendall recounts in an essay in Smithsonian magazine, he contended that Jefferson and Williams were making too much of their limited observations. Converting forests to fields may have led to some localized microclimatic shifts, such as more windiness or more varied winter conditions. But that didn't mean the country as a whole was getting less annual snowfall. "We have, in the cultivated districts, deep snow today, and none tomorrow," Webster recorded. "But the same quantity of snow falling in the woods lies there till spring. . . . This will explain all the appearances of the seasons without resorting to the unphilosophical [i.e., unscientific] hypothesis of a general increase in heat."
Jefferson and Williams weren't wrong to imagine that human activity could be having an effect on climate — today it is generally accepted that fossil-fuel consumption has contributed to an average global temperature rise of about 1.1 degrees Celsius since 1880 — but they erred in believing that North America's climate had moderated since the 17th century because settlers were building farms. The earth's climate has always been in flux, including long before human farming or industry became established.
Actually, the warming trend that Jefferson was writing about in 1785 represented a respite from an intense period of unusually cold weather during the previous century. During much of the 1600s, the entire Northern Hemisphere was frozen in what is now regarded as a Little Ice Age, likely brought on by a series of massive volcanic eruptions that ejected enormous quantities of vapor, sulfur dioxide, and aerosols into the stratosphere. (Some scientists also suggest that diminished solar sunspot activity was a factor.)
 For much of the 17th century, the Northern Hemisphere was locked in what has been called the 'Little Ice Age." When the Pilgrims landed in 1620, the region was snowbound in a 'sharp and violent' winter. |
When the Pilgrims arrived in New England aboard the Mayflower in 1620, for example, the region was in the grip of inhospitably cold weather. "For now it was Winter, and they that know the winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruel and fierce storms," wrote William Bradford in his account of Plymouth Colony's founding and first decades. Two decades later, John Winthrop, the first leader of the Massachusetts Bay colony north of Plymouth, observed that
the frost was so great and continual this winter that all the Bay was frozen over, so much and so long, as the like, by the Indians' relation, had not been so these 40 years. . . . To the southward also the frost was as great and the snow as deep. And at Virginia itself the great [Chesapeake] bay was much of it frozen over and all of their great rivers.
There were similar reports of unusually cold temperatures and extreme weather in many parts of the world. In the opening pages of "Global Crisis," his monumental work on climate change in the 17th century, the British historian Geoffrey Parker assembles scores of such accounts.
In Tokyo in 1641, snow began falling in November, much earlier than usual. Java experienced a drought that lasted from 1643 to 1671. The weather in Hungary was uncommonly wet and cold between 1638 and 1641. In Bohemia, crops were devastated by repeated summertime frosts. At around the same time, farmers in Iceland, unable to grow hay because of the unusual cold, tried in desperation to feed their cattle dried fish. The Nile fell to the lowest level ever known, Turkey underwent a disastrous drought, and in the Yangtze valley in China, "chroniclers recorded abnormal rain and cold throughout the spring of 1642."
The climate crisis lasted for decades. In Russia, Parker writes, "tree-ring, pollen, and peat-bed data show that the springs, autumns, and winters between 1650 and 1680 were some of the coldest on record." A Turkish traveler in Africa wrote in the 1670s that
no one in Egypt used to know about wearing furs. There was no winter. But now we have severe winters and we have started wearing fur because of the cold.
The global cooling of that age took a terrible toll on human life. "A third of the world has died," the Abbess Angélique Arnauld wrote in a letter in 1654. Based on the historical evidence that survives, Parker concludes, the abbess's bleak estimate may well have been accurate.
All of which confirms yet again that climate change is not new. Nor is the impulse to blame human activity for seemingly inexorable changes in weather trends. As Parker amply documents, the search for scapegoats in the 17th century was intense. People blamed climate change on everything from sinfulness to witchcraft to overpopulation. Climate alarmists today are no less judgmental in their denunciation of behavior that they claim contributes to the planet's warming trend — from having children to traveling to living a wealthy lifestyle to not divesting from fossil-fuel companies.
But there is one all-important difference between climate change in the past and climate change today. Severe weather today poses far less of a threat to human life than it used to.
The number of people dying because of extreme weather events in our time is a slim fraction of those who lost their lives as recently as a century ago. In the 1920s, the world averaged over 500,000 deaths from natural disasters per year. Global population has quadrupled since then, yet the annual number of deaths from climate disasters has fallen to well below 50,000 — a decrease of more than 90 percent. Why? Because societies are wealthier than they were 100 years ago, their technology is vastly improved, and their infrastructure is much more advanced. Fossil fuels and rising CO2 levels may indeed be responsible for the gradual rise in average global temperatures and at least some of the extreme weather of recent decades. But the industrialization made possible by burning those fossil fuels has dramatically boosted our ability to protect ourselves from climate-related killers.
Climate change in the 17th century represented a worldwide crisis, one that caused millions of untimely deaths from cold, drought, starvation, and disease. The global warming of the 21st century poses challenges too. But no matter how vehemently the alarmists insist otherwise, it isn't an onrushing catastrophe and won't end life as we know it. The world will adapt to climate change even as it preserves the energy-driven technology that has made human beings safer, healthier, better fed, and less poor than ever. Lord knows we have a lot to deal with in 2024. Fortunately, an impending climate apocalypse isn't on the agenda.
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What I Wrote Then
25 years ago on the op-ed page
From "Papal interference in Missouri," Feb. 4, 1999:
Because the pope asked him to, Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan spared the life of triple murderer Darrell Mease, who was scheduled to die by lethal injection. It is fair to wonder: What other papal wishes would Carnahan grant? . . . If His Holiness had asked the governor to commute a rapist's sentence, would he have agreed? What if the pope had begged him to shut down an abortion clinic? Or to speak out against gay rights?
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The Last Line
"Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away." — Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ozymandias" (1818)
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(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
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