Everybody loves a good scare story, especially around Halloween, right? But what about when the scare story becomes a fixation for some people?
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
US Secretary of State John Kerry has been at it again, warning that, despite the absence of any warming for 18 years, and the utter failure of climate models to show predictive skill, we had better act on the recommendations of alarmists.
According to Kerry, the window for facing the challenge was “closing quickly”. Kerry warned of dire consequences if climate change sceptics were wrong about the future and nothing is done.
Mr Kerry said the window for facing the challenge was “closing quickly” and warned of dire consequences if climate change sceptics were wrong about the future and nothing is done.
“If they’re wrong, catastrophe,” Mr Kerry said in Boston after visiting a wind-technology testing centre with British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond.
But what about the risk Cthulhu will rise from the ocean and destroy the world?
Cthulhu, for those of you who are less geeky than myself, is a fictional monster created by the 1920s horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. In his iconic horror story “The Call of Cthulhu”, Cthulhu rises briefly from the ocean depths, and sends out his ancient call. Across the world, psychically “sensitive” people respond by having horrible nightmares, fabulous visions, or going insane. Thankfully though, for reasons unknown, Cthulhu sinks again beneath the waves.
In the words of Lovecraft,
“Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone which has shielded him since the sun was young. His accursed city is sunken once more, for the Vigilant sailed over the spot after the April storm; but his ministers on earth still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely places. He must have been trapped by the sinking whilst within his black abyss, or else the world would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come – but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.”
http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/thecallofcthulhu.htm
But is this really fiction? H.P. Lovecraft always denied Cthulhu existed during his lifetime, but you would expect that kind of denial, wouldn’t you, when dealing with eldritch reality threatening horror which could scarcely be contemplated without skirting the fringes of insanity.
Serious scientific effort has been throw at analysing Lovecraft’s descriptions of events, and has discovered disturbing parallels between the prose of the horror writer, and mathematically describable cosmic geometries. http://titaniumphysicists.brachiolopemedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Rlyeh.pdf
So the question we must ask ourselves – despite the total lack of evidence, can we be sure that our self abuse will not cause Cthulhu to rise once again from the deeps – perhaps disturbed by deep ocean heating and ocean acidification, to wreak his awful reign upon mankind? What if we’re wrong – can we take that chance?
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I have mentioned here before that we should not be mucking about in Antarctica.
Shoggoths, you know.
The Thing!
Er… try the other Pole.
No, sorry, you’re right.
The Blob? I don’t remember which Pole he/she/it got dropped on.
nielszoo – The blob was from the north pole. The 1958 version is one of my favorite movies for a laugh. They should make a sequel to both movies like they did with “Alien versus Predator”… “The Blob Versus the Thing”.
Heh.. too much CO2 in our greenhouses might cause another “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes”.. or something in Kerry’s imagination 😉
The Thing from Another World (1951) was a great, corny B movie starring James Arness (of Gunsmoke fame) and was located in the Arctic. The Thing (2011), which I have not seen, was located in the Antarctic.
By that remark “The Thing”, I presume you mean John Kerry’s wig?
So maybe the atmospheric heat disappeared into the Other Dimension along with the Elder Gods and John Kerry is a Shoggoth left behind. I’m just sayin’ ….
So climate scientists our psychically “sensitive” people?
Cthulhu for President! Why vote for the lesser evil?
“That is not dead which only sleeping lies…and with strange aeons even death may die.” Sounds like Lovecraft knew that Global Warming heat was hiding in the deep oceans…
Somebody needs to shout ‘Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn’ at Kerry, see if anyone gets the reference….
That’s easy for you to say! 😉
But I guess we all ‘wait, dreaming’. I just hope we’re not all dead when the dream comes true – and we get to see those that brought us to this sad pass are brought to account in a Climate Change Nuremberg. Let’s face it, the Third World demands nothing less for the way they are being sacrificed to the great God AGW.
The first witness for the prosecution in the CC Nuremberg should be our own Supreme Court for its finding that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. That one finding enabled a world of hurt for the poor and disadvantaged around the world.
iSchadow: The SCOTUS is a failed institution; it no longer serves to monitor compliance with the Constitutions distribution of powers (and express limitations on federal power); it is purely political. I seem to recall that Mr Justice Douglas once said his test to be “Do you want a program or not?”
OOps, Harry beat me to it. Say that, and you might get mistaken for Joe Romm.
They’ll just think you swallowed your upper plate….
A dangerous clown like Kerry is far scarier than anything from fiction.
Kerry’s resemblance to Lurch has frequently aroused comment.
This comment is a disservice to Lurch who served a useful purpose.
I wonder whether Kerry’s avid environmentalist wife eggs him on?
He is going beyond the call of duty as the United States Secretary of State. He should have been made head of the EPA.
She is rich. Stop using you car so she can continue using her private jet.
I have long felt that Kerry’s only talent is his ability to marry incredibly rich women. He’s done it twice, the last time hitting the multi-billion dollar jackpot.
I guess he thought that the big ship Navy would be a safe place during a jungle war, not knowing that the Navy had little river boats, too. Once he got to Vietnam, it didn’t take him long to write himself up for three Purple Hearts and a ticket home.
Shaving cuts didn’t count for Purple Hearts in the Air Force, and anyway, I had a Norelco.
A relative of mine who was a cook on a Navy ship offshore of north Vietnam in the late 60s got a purple heart when a can of beans fell out of an overhead shelf in rough weather, requiring several stitches to his head, when they happened to be engaging in tactical operations.
Splinter Hero.
He sounds like Frank Burns. (Think M*A*S*H). I’m Canadian but Kerry sounds like a danger to everyone.
Cheryl
October 16, 2014 at 2:06 am
Please don’t mention MASH in any serious comment about anything, save to demonstrate how the popular media like TV and the movies try to paint a funny face on a nasty war.
I’d hate to be Kerry and have to live by the precautionary principle the way he and others who preach Chicken Little’s “The sky is falling!” They’d have to be careful walking outside…a piano might fall from the sky, you know.
Or a safe, lettered “Acme” on it’s side.
On the brighter side, he’d punch through the bottom of the safe, then the door would fall open and he’d be able to step out… dissheveled, but still alive.
That would be a problem, if, and ONLY IF, there was any accountability in the system, which there isn’t.
These idiots like Kerry can put crap like this out over and over, and the sheeple will gobble it up.
Ooga in, chucka out.
Jim
Kerry has no elective future and everybody but he knows it. This makes him the perfect sacrifice when the politicians face the fury to come. He is the expendable Pointman for this administrations policies on the control of energy.
We should be very worried as Obama has mobilized both Kerry and the pentagon to battle this “crisis”. Forget about Ebola “climate change is real!”.
Cthulhu is more realistic.
Cthulhu is hiding the heat!
But remember, it’s dark heat, so is invisible to our mortal-made sensors.
Kerry knows HIS time is running out, and once this administration ends, so does his political career. He’s fishing for a job with some large NGO, so he can continue to live off other people’s money.
John Kerry cares not about any continued income. He solved that problem when he married the Widow Hines. Instead it must be political influence, (or at the least relevancy) that he fears losing.
Can’t lose what he never had.
It’s worse. Kerry also says:
“The worst that could happen to us is we create a whole lot of new jobs, we kick our economies into gear, we have healthier people, healthier children because we have cleaner air, we live up to our environmental responsibility, we become truly energy independent, and our security is stronger and greater and sustainable as a result. That’s the worst that happens to us.”
He thinks his green policies will work out great even if the climate stays the same, or becomes cooler.
He just doesn’t understand that expensive energy and energy shortages will kill vast numbers of people.
Fortunately, the people are rightfully much more concerned about Ebola right now to pay much attention to a buffoon like Kerry.
So Kerry is no longer doing his Abe Lincoln one-man show? I see he ditched the stovepipe hat. Since we no longer have any slaves that need to be freed, Kerry is desperate for some personal act that will give his meaningless life real meaning. Climate change today, perhaps Ebola tomorrow.
He thought he would be the one to solve the problems between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The Palestinians wanted the Israelis dead, and the latter in typical intransigent fashion would not go along.
How do you pronounce “Cthulhu”?
carefully
Just like it’s spelled. ☺
I tried, but now I can’t get my tongue out of my throat. Should have listened to earwig instead.
According to wiki …
“Lovecraft transcribed the pronunciation of Cthulhu as Khlûl′-hloo and said that “the first syllable [of Khlûl′-hloo is] pronounced gutturally and very thickly. The u is about like that in full; and the first syllable is not unlike klul in sound, hence the h represents the guttural thickness.”[2] S. T. Joshi points out, however, that Lovecraft gave several differing pronunciations on different occasions.[3] According to Lovecraft, this is merely the closest that the human vocal apparatus can come to reproducing the syllables of an alien language.[4]
Long after Lovecraft’s death, the spelling pronunciation /kəˈθuːluː/ kə-thoo-loo became common, and the role-playing game Call of Cthulhu endorsed it.”
Who can pronounce Chlodowich?
(Hint: a historical king)
Why the schwa? It’s easy enough to pronounce /kθu/ without it. I’ve always regarded the “lh” to be a heavily aspirated /l/, but it could be a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative, like the Welsh /ɬ/ (spelled “ll”).
“Who can pronounce Chlodowich”
I can.
Most people say Clovis. You talk funny.;-)
‘How do you pronounce “Cthulhu”?’
Well, it’s spelled “Cthulhu”, but it’s actually pronounced “Throatwarbler Mangrove”.
This is how it’s pronounced, from an authoritative source:
This is typical of the climate shakedown, what I call ‘Climate Extortion’. It works like this, “pay up or somthing bad will happen.”
With all the things he should worry about, Kerry decides to focus on CAGW (and, one supposes, the tooth fairy).
Sigh.
At some level, I suppose his quote “…“If they’re wrong, catastrophe…” is technically accurate. However, there are millions of other things with much higher probabilities for ending up as catastrophes. For example: sudden discovery of rampageing woolly mammoths.
We don’t expect leaders to understand atmospheric physics, but we do expect them to have decent s**t-detectors to filter out the trivial and absurd. Kerry, as in so many other areas, fails this test.
This is very predictable. Much like another famous politician who uttered the phrase on nationwide TV:”It depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is…”…
For Kerry, and many others on the TEAM, he just chooses to define catastrophe differently…like “Catastrophe: anything that happens that I don’t like.”
It’s even simplier than that. AGW is a made-up crises. Ebola, the Palestinian question, ISIS, Russia, etc. are very real, very difficult problems. Kerry (and Obama) is a small man and capable only of concentrating on small or made-up problems. He, and his boss, are merely working at their level of competence.
Perhaps Kerry should concern himself with the the climate change that would be brought about by Terran sneaking an atomic bomb into Tel Aviv and the Israeli response of nuking every Muslim city with a name?
Wait for the IraXis to have a nuclear Oopsie! at their fabrication facility. The UN/OAS will be all owl-eyes, “Who? Whoo wee, not me!”
Michael Palmer asks: How do you pronounce “Cthulhu”?
Wikipedia to the rescue (too bad it is worthless on controversial issues, e.g., “Global Warming”):
Lovecraft transcribed the pronunciation of Cthulhu as Khlûl′-hloo and said that “the first syllable [of Khlûl′-hloo is] pronounced gutturally and very thickly. The u is about like that in full; and the first syllable is not unlike klul in sound, hence the h represents the guttural thickness.” S. T. Joshi points out, however, that Lovecraft gave several differing pronunciations on different occasions. According to Lovecraft, this is merely the closest that the human vocal apparatus can come to reproducing the syllables of an alien language.
Long after Lovecraft’s death, the spelling pronunciation /kəˈθuːluː/ kə-THOO-loo became common, and the role-playing game Call of Cthulhu endorsed it.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu)
Thanks for the perfect metaphor, Eric Worrall!
According to Owl Bore, the window of opportunity closed 15, 10, and 5 years ago.
Since it is too late to save ourselves, we might as well party on.
Just one more reason why US voters got it right in November 2004.
For Mrs. Heinz-Kerry’s little boy’s association with politics, it should be Leviathan rather than Cthulhu. Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil Thomas Hobbes, 1651
Cthulhu, or Zoidberg?… You decide.
I suspect H.P.L.’s Cthulhu (1920s ?) can be compared to the trouble in Russia in 1917 and, like then, people without moral principles are involved.
The leaders of the world’s democracies have neglected serious issues. For example, hemorrhagic fevers (~~Ebola) have been known for a long time. Why do we now face the need to find a vaccine in as short a time as months? Instead of being populated by climate fools the US Administration should be filled with realists/pragmatists that might have foreseen and prevented this medical issue, and also, prevented a part of the world from being subjected to a rabble with beliefs of a fringe group from Late Antiquity.
They say that the winning side in a vote deserve what they get. I did not vote for these fools.
Why no vaccine. It comes down to money. The problem is because diseases like Ebola were largely confined to impoverished countries who couldn’t afford medical care for most of the infected let alone millions if not billions for research. And the drug companies are not going to do the research if no ones paying. After all they’re in business not charity. And the charities are usually more concerned with using what funds they have to help those dying now. All that aside one big roadblock to vaccine research is Ebola itself. It is a deadly and contagious disease. And since it was confined to the third world researchers would be forced to either bring victims to them (something the CDC frowns on). Or going to them which would necessitate building and equipping a lab. All of which would drive up the cost. So it comes down to money that the third world was unable to pay and the first world was unwilling to. Lets just hope we didn’t leave it until too late
I can’t pronounce Cthulhu either forward or backwards !!
Bert, I just say (in my head) Ca tool oo.
Very dangerous to pronounce backwards. That’s how Michael Palmer ended up with his tongue down his gullet.
“What if you are wrong” is a powerful religious incentive weakened only by the fact of so many people saying it for so many things: What if you are wrong about your spouse, your hometown, your college, your nation, your church, your work, your ethics, your health.
What if you ignore that twinge you felt this morning. What if you ignore that heartburn, maybe it was really a heart attack. What if you ignore that sneeze, that wheeze, that flu. Maybe it’s Ebola, maybe it’s Hanta. What if you have too much sugar, what if you don’t have enough.
What if you ignore the Russians; what if you don’t.
Global warming. It’s in there somewhere.
Michael 2
“Global warming. It’s in there somewhere.”
And it’s probably to blame for them all, right down to the colour of your coat, how Arsenal will do next match, and kiddies liking sweets [= candy].
//Sarc – although not too disguised, I think.
Auto.
What’s a “nal?”
Be amazed by the fear of error and of continuing error. Few of us make truly substantive errors, else we wouldn’t be here. Better a good error, a learning opportunity, than the bad question. Experience is a good teacher. A bad experience is a better teacher.
Same old, same ols, could have been written yesterday.
1923-
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/147050331?searchTerm=climate%20is%20changing&searchLimits=
“WINTER* ARE WARMER.
Why the World’# Climate is Changing.
Our climate is becoming milder.
There are exceptions, of course, but
generally speaking extremes of cold
in winter no longer occur as they did
in years gone by.
Nor does this apply only to our own
country. It is the same all over the
world.
Iceland is no longer what its name
implies—the land of ice. During the
winter of 1920-21 there was neither
snow nor frost there, and for many
previous winters there has been very
little.
The ice on the Neva River in Russia
breaks up three weeks earlier than it
did a generation ago. The Alpine glaciers
are everywhere retreating, so
that cultivation is now possible in valleys
which, within the memory of
people still alive, were icebound all
the year round.
In Caanda, year by year the area
under wheat is being extended northward,
sure sign that the weather there
is becoming milder. The Governor of
the Falkland Islands reported recently
that the climate there is not nearly so
severe as it was seventy, or eighty
years ago.
Similar instances could be quoted almost
indefinitely, and the combined evidence
from so many different sources
is irresistible. Everywhere, all over
the globe, the winters aTe becoming
lees rigorous.
In a book entitled “Warmer Winters
and the Earth’s Tilt,” Major R. A. Marriott
sets forth his thory as to the reason
for this world-wide phenomenon.
Briefly put, his contention is that the
earth is gradually changing its position
so as to bring the poles more directly
under the sun’s rays, with the result
that the ice-caps stored there during;
past ages are gradually diminishing in
size. ‘ j
We are, in fact, at the tail end of the j
last great Ice Age, which was at its j
maximum about 15,000 years ago, when ;
the greater part of Europe was shroud-1
ed under an ice-cap a mile or more!
thick. j
This was the period when the earth
was tilted in such a way; that the heat j
of the sun was concentrated on the
tropical and sub-tropical regions of the
globe, the poles getting hardly any.
The process is now being reversed.
| So in a time which may not be very far
I nff, large areas near the North Pole
will be rendered productive for the requirements
of mankind and-capable of
supporting a large population”
John Kerry has been lying to America since the 1970’s. I don’t believe anything he says.
I saw this story running on Drudge Report early this morning. As I was skimming John Kerry’s prognostications of impending doom, I was frankly embarrassed that my country is represented by this fool on the international stage. My subconscious started ‘playing’ Crazy Train – Ozzy Osbourne, as accompaniment to Kerry’s insanity. These lyrics, in particular, seem to apply to Mr. Kerry:
I’ve listened to preachers
I’ve listened to fools
I’ve watched all the dropouts
Who make their own rules
One person conditioned to rule and control
The media sells it and you live the role
Mental wounds still screaming
Driving me insane
I’m going off the rails on a crazy train
I’m going off the rails on a crazy train
http://youtu.be/3MLp7YNTznE