Faith & Spirit Quote by Don Young

Don Young isn’t reminiscing about medieval Scotland; he’s staging a counter-myth to modern climate alarm. The line is built like a barroom history lesson: a stack of vivid, half-remembered anecdotes meant to feel more trustworthy than charts. Grapes in Scotland, a “wide open” Northwest Passage, Iceland as farmland - each image cues a simple inference: climate changes, therefore today’s changes aren’t necessarily a crisis, therefore regulation is overreach. The specificity (“for God sakes,” “huge winery”) is the rhetorical trick. It performs authenticity, inviting you to hear a guy who’s been around, not a committee report.

The subtext is regional and ideological. Young, an Alaska Republican, is defending an economy tied to oil, extraction, and shipping. If warming has historical precedent, then contemporary warming can be framed as cyclical, manageable, even beneficial - and anyone arguing otherwise becomes hysterical, elitist, or politically motivated. That’s why he reaches for the Northwest Passage: it’s not just climate; it’s a trade route, a strategic corridor, a symbol of opportunity rather than catastrophe.

Context matters because the examples are a mash-up of real phenomena and distorted timelines - the Medieval Warm Period, Norse Greenland, local glacier retreat - collapsed into a single talking point. The aim isn’t accuracy; it’s inoculation. By flooding the listener with picturesque “facts,” Young turns scientific complexity into a shrug: if Earth has swung before, why listen now?