Sid the Comic: on climactic change
August 10, 2006
by Sid Knowles

I have decided it is time that I throw my hat into the global warming debate. With the increase in temperatures throughout the world the need for a hat might not be as great as it used to be. And if I can solve the global warming problem, the world will undoubtedly, in appreciation, buy me a new hat; so, it’s a win/win situation for me as far as I can see. And just to show I’m magnanimous in victory, I will insist that the world buy Al Gore a new hat, too.

Justifying the hours that my research assistant has billed me to investigate the problem of global warming, he discovered that a mere 31 years ago--that would be 1975 for those of you who are mathophobic--the major problem facing the planet in the not so humble opinion of the experts was global cooling.

According to an article in Newsweek (and we know the high standards employed by Newsweek journalists), scientists were “almost unanimous” in the view that the earth was turning into a huge deep freeze.

According to these scientists, entire countries, some the size of Canada, were going to turn into cold, environmentally hostile places with long cold winters and short summers. Hyperbole ruled the day with some people claiming that vast swatches of deserts were going to turn into nice comfortable places to live year round.

Huddled in their down filled parkas, the world's intellectuals ignored the fact that they looked like a bunch of geeks from Scandinavia devising a solution to global freezing before it was too late. (Adding some really cool organ music would underline the seriousness of the problems faced by these brave “intellectuals”.)

The downside of this global cooling was the specter of hundreds of thousands of people in poor countries dying from either the cold, the famine induced from the cold, the world war started by the famine induced by the cold or the post world war chaos resulting from the world war caused by the famine induced by the cold.

The situation, according to the experts was serious And consider the term “experts” to include people who would say anything to get their names in the newspaper with or without expertise and not verified by the journalists who quote them.

Like today’s global warming, global freezing was so serious that the science of actually proving that there was a problem could be overlooked, the impending catastrophe assumed to be true. Was the situation then as bad as it is now with global warming?

One of the major causes of this global freezing was presumed to be from deodorant and air freshener aerosol spray cans. It was determined that either the propellant in these spray cans, or their sweet aromas directly were responsible for the dropping mercury. So the governments of the world sprung into action and decided that until a spray can of deodorant could be developed which did not freeze the monkeys off of brass Eskimos (who prefer to be called “Innuit,” a word that means “really cold people”), people’s arm pits would have to make do with roll-ons or stick deodorants -or nothing at all.

And this leads me to my solution to global warming: bring back the aerosols of the '70s. If everybody who uses a stick or a roll on deodorant switched to an aerosol spray, we could lick this global warming problem and still keep our jobs, our furnaces and our cars.

People have shown that when it comes to global temperature change, they are willing to send their armpits into battle. Our deodorant habits saved the world once, they can save it again, and, maybe, we can convince the inhabitants of a well known French speaking European country whose name I will not mention that deodorant is not such a bad thing after all.

Sid Knowles © Copyright 2006


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