Sunday, September 5, 2010

How heat waves can alter history

After experiencing a month of what I consider intollerable heat, I have come to the realization that many things that have or have not happened throughout history were probably influenced in someway or another by the weather.

Israel, like much of the northern hemisphere, has experienced its hottest August in recorded history. While I love to say that I was there for superlative events, I prefer the good ones and "hottest summer in recorded history" is not one of those. That said, the last time I complained about the weather on my blog, my old high school friend who now lives in Cyrus wrote to say: "38 degrees? That's it? It's 44 in Cyprus." That took the steam out of my rant and also provoked me to make a mental note to stay away from Cyprus in the summer.

The heat also proved to be the deciding factor in the cancellation of our end-of-summer family trip because how can you go on a day-long water hike when all the hiking routes that had water, have dried up because of the heat?

Which brings me one of those historical moment thoughts. It dawns on me that if someone like Vivaldi had lived in Israel during a heat-wave, he might never have written the Four Seasons. Actually, skip the heat wave, if he had lived in Israel he, at best, would have written, the Two and a Half Seasons: Hot, Hotter, and Damp. Not the most inspirational environment.

And the hotel chain? I think it would be hard to market the Two and a Half Seasons Hotel.

And all that Ansel Adams photography?All that would have survived were his mountain views. Lovely, but without the depth of his existing porfolio.

Now, on the upside, maybe many of the world's wars and other such skirmishes (I don't know why they call them that in the media, but I like that word) might never have happened.

If the Crusaders had arrived in Jerusalem wearing all that iron-clad gear in the middle of a heat wave they would have been smart to have just turned around and left Jerusalem alone or even better, they would have died of heat exposure and saved the Jews a lot of subsequent grief. Without the Crusaders initiating a couple of hundred years of murdering Jews for no good reason (of course it took until 1990 something for a pope to admit that), we Jews could have been much better positioned to beat the pulp out of that little evil part-Jewish pyscho dictator Hitler and now we would be at least twice as many people as we are. This in turn, would have possibly (I said "possibly") made the modern-day fanatic anti-semites reconsider their plans to annihate us. Oh, they would still want to but we would be a much bigger and stronger group and since they are all essentially rhetoric heavy, action lite, we might have been in a better position than we find ourselves.

Notice that all the good heat waves come when you don't need them.

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