A natural swing of the climatic pendulum?

The preliminary climate statistics are here.

The ten warmest years globally since 1880 have all occured since 1995.

Farrago

Only 109 days until opening day of baseball season! I have every reason to believe that this will be the year the Brewers cast off the small-market shell that has been holding them captive to losing. Oh, how I could go for a 7:05 first pitch at Miller Park on a sunny June evening. Ben Sheets vs. Mark Prior. I'd even take a 9:05 game at Chavez Ravine or Pacific"Belle". At least if it must be winter it could actually be winter. I hate the cold as much as the next person, but this is Wisconsin, after all. We are right where you would expect for the last half-decade; it is the middle of December and there is no snow on the ground and it is 45 degrees. I miss those real winters we used to have where there was actually snow on the ground for weeks on end and it was cold and icy and wintry. If you want some proof of global warming just google the madison lakes ice-on and ice-off dates. You will notice the trend of later ice-ons and earlier ice-offs, especially over the last decade or so.

One ray of hope is the document which is expected soon that will liberalize the Traditional Latin Mass which was the norm for Catholics for 1500 years before the protestants infiltrated in the 1960s. The Tridentine Rite, as it is commonly known, was never forbidden, but it fell into dissuse by the 1970s. In contrast to the protestantized mass that is so common now, the latin mass is a carefully choreographed work of art that was refined over a thousand years. It is quiet, reverant, and mysterious. The priest and the people both face the same direction and the priest chants the prayers in latin. The latin mass is a mysterious encounter with God as opposed to the pedestrian gathering of soccer moms that typifies most masses these days.

H.L. Mencken, the famous literary critic and self-proclaimed atheist described the old mass:

...
The Latin Church, which I constantly find myself admiring, despite its occasional astounding imbecilities, has always kept clearly before it the fact that religion is not a syllogism, but a poem. It is accused by Protestant dervishes of withholding the Bible from the people. To some extent this is true; to some extent the church is wise; again to the same extent it is prosperous.

Rome indeed has not only preserved the original poetry of Christianity; it has also made capital additions to that poetry -- for example, the poetry of the saints, of Mary, and of the liturgy itself. A solemn high mass is a thousand times as impressive, to a man with any genuine religious sense in him, as the most powerful sermon ever roared under the big top by Presbyterian auctioneer of God. In the face of such overwhelming beauty it is not necessary to belabor the faithful with logic; they are better convinced by letting them alone.

Preaching is not an essential part of the Latin ceremonial. It was very little employed in the early church, and I am convinced that good effects would flow from abandoning it today, or, at all events, reducing it to a few sentences, more or less formal. In the United States the Latin brethren have been seduced by the example of the Protestants, who commonly transform an act of worship into a puerile intellectual exercise; instead of approaching God in fear and wonder these Protestants settle back in their pews, cross their legs, and listen to an ignoramus try to prove that he is a better theologian than the Pope.

This folly the Romans now slide into. Their clergy begin to grow argumentative, doctrinaire, ridiculous. It is a pity. A bishop in his robes, playing his part in the solemn ceremonial of the mass, is a dignified spectacle; the same bishop, bawling against Darwin half an hour later, is seen to be simply an elderly Irishman with a bald head, the son of a respectable police sergeant in South Bend, Ind. Let the reverend fathers go back to Bach. If they keep on spoiling poetry and spouting ideas, the day will come when some extra-bombastic deacon will astound humanity and insult God by proposing to translate the liturgy into American, that all the faithful may be convinced by it.