Who knows anymore? Shucks, Gomer, we’ve always had weather.

“Not sure, we’ll have to wait and see” is a typically Midwestern way of declaring Hell No.

What’s the weather have in store? Not sure, we’ll have to wait and see.

See here, the wind whips and the drought lingers, the temperatures rise in July when the corn tassels, the rains can get freakish. Seldom have roofs been so put upon. An orange glow from wildfires has set over Storm Lake.

Wait and see, my foot.

The top agronomists at Iowa State and the top physical scientists at the U of Iowa agree that climate change is real, and it presents a present danger to crop and livestock production. They warn about it year after year in a climate statement signed by academic scientists across the state, including Buena Vista, which normally is not a sky-is-falling kind of place.

Yet “uncertain” is the hallmark among farmers in the Tall Corn State surveyed about global warming by the Iowa Farm and Rural Life Poll. The longstanding poll is conducted by ISU, and its results were used to group farmer respondents among six categories: dismissive, doubtful, disengaged, cautious, concerned and alarmed. Forty-two percent were doubtful or dismissive, and 28% were concerned or alarmed. Thirty percent were disengaged or cautious.

“I should reduce greenhouse gas emissions from my farm operation” — 45% were uncertain, they told the poll, and 28% disagreed.

Half are uncertain if the state or ISU should do something about it.

Agriculture may account for 15% of greenhouse gas emissions. What Iowa farmers do matters. At least half suggested that they did not plan to change.

If you are uncertain, it means you don’t actually believe what the acclaimed soil and climate scientists think in Ames, and that your research is superior.

You can assume smarts by sporting faux skepticism. You know the weather as well as any Dr. Who. We have had weather before. Who’s to say what brought it on? Could be just the hand of God or the odds, like the fact that Iowa is at the national fore for cancer.

That’s why you may as well take that $9 billion in US funds streaming toward Harvard and, as President Trump recommends, redirect it to Iowa Central in Fort Dodge and Iowa Lakes in Estherville. The auto body program could take over research on spine surgery, the farm ops kids could conduct some clinical trials on herd immunity when hogs are exposed to avian flu, and the future nurses could assume the lead on gene therapy cures for brain tumors. Who needs the University of Iowa?

Science is a fraud, RFK2 implies. No bird flu vaccines for you, Moderna, or for those of us most exposed right here around Northwest Iowa.

When science is quackery or at best tom foolery, you can either become disengaged (7% of Iowa farmers) or cautious (23%) or dismissive (22%) of global warming down on the farm.

So nothing changes.

We don’t know if Roundup causes cancer even though juries and judges have concluded in the billions that it does.

We aren’t sure if southern Iowa will become so hot over the next few decades that corn yields could drop by a third. That’s what the National Climate Assessment said in a section written by Iowa State PhDs. Why believe them? How can you know when the cropaganda machine, oiled and fueled by corn in Ames and Des Moines, is telling you to keep on keeping on?

Meanwhile, the roofing crews are too busy to come down from all the storm damage. The gulleywashers scour and the wind blows the soil such that Chicago is obscured. Well, you’ll have that, and Pacific Junction washing down the Missouri every now and then. It happens. Should I do something? I am told that I would be foolish to do anything on such a scale that it would matter. When it is the only game to play, you shrug and follow its rules: Plant up to and into the ditch, bring on the hogs. Not sure about cover crops this far north? Might as well not, even if it works, because erosion can be overcome with the right technology that depends on oil and the Saudis and Qatar, who may or may not be on the up and up.

So who knows in a mind that takes established science under advisement? It is a mind not made up over facts that have been established by merely looking out the window at the tree branch bending over the street like it never did before. When you apply that mindset to democracy, you can see how freedom can be quickly rendered. Facts are relative, open to alternatives, even as they crash through your window.

Powerful stuff, propaganda, enough to make you think that derechos are normal and that obliterating Chicago is acceptable and that the Gulf of America (fka Mexico) can just go suffocate.

Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.

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