A couple of days after a friend of mine waved off the fourteen-day weather forecast in front of me, explaining that he took meteorology to be a "soft science," he attributed the canicular heat wave to "global warming" as one might rust to oxidation. Now, my friend is no fool but he does hold some positions for reasons more preferential than rational. This would be one. Identifying a trend is a matter of observation and correlation; projecting the same without a full account of variables and their mutability is conjecture. Scientific prognoses of this kind are often the most exponential, with all the predictive authority of proposing that a Toyota Tercel moving forward from standstill on green just after midnight, New Year's Day, shall, sixty-three years later, reach the speed of light in time for the Thanksgiving travel rush.
Certainly when, in some quarters, Hurricane Katrina is spoken of George W. Bush is, too — more precisely, the president's name is taken in vain. Since September of last year, however, a second subject of apostrophe has been "global warming" itself, as if it were Mother Nature corporeal. Rain, wind, snow — all expositive of a thing, a force, effecting them by causation that surpasses reason, except for academic consensus and computer models. Orson Scott Card, I learned yesterday, has also been watching as surety supplants method.