I see the alarmist industry are now really reaching, anecdotally. Today’s claim is that “Henry David Thoreau . . . turns out to have another line in his résumé: climate researcher.” The point of invoking Thoreau is obvious:

Thoreau died in 1862, when the industrial revolution was just beginning to pump climate-changing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. In 1851, when he started recording when and where plants flowered in Concord, he was making notes for a book on the seasons.Now, though, researchers at Boston University and Harvard are using those notes to discern patterns of plant abundance and decline in Concord — and by extension, New England — and to link those patterns to changing climate.

How about turning as well to someone else of similar interest and meticulous record-keeping regarding matters horticultural and climatic, and not just in his backyard but with an eye toward developments elsewhere? Heck, I dunno, maybe one who didn’t die at such a convenient moment?

Living five miles from Monticello, I enjoy visiting and reading of Thomas Jefferson’s experiences there. I am particularly fond of this, as recently noted also by Ed.

Of course, Jefferson’s death predates the bogeyman Industrial Revolution, so his inconvenient observations on that which is always underway — climate change – ensure that his more global perspective will not find favor in our contemporary climate-change narrative.

If we are going to so misuse Thoreau’s work, I believe the better addition to his CV would be “IPCC lead author”.