COLUMBUS, OHIO — Few would argue that the debate on global warming engenders a lot of emotion. What else are we to make of comments that ‘within the last 40 or 50 years there has been a very great observable change of climate,’ that ‘a change in our climate … is taking place very sensibly’ and that ‘men are led into numberless errors by drawing general conclusions from particular facts?’ That these comments were actually tossed around back in the late 18th century by the Pennsylvania doctor Hugh Williamson, Thomas Jefferson and Noah Webster reminds us that history has a tendency to repeat itself. (One can imagine what television talk shows would have been like then. Would Jefferson have promoted ‘An Inconvenient Treatise’only to be acrimoniously contradicted by Webster on ‘Hard Quoits,’ assuming either could get a word in amid the jabbering of the host?) In the 1780s, Thomas Jefferson opined in his ‘Notes on Virginia’ that ‘both heats and colds are become much more moderate within the memory even of the middle-aged,’ expressing views articulated as early as 1721 by Cotton Mather: ‘Our cold is much moderated since the opening and clearing of our woods, and the […]