The Earth on Fire

It's unfortunate that summer is the only quarter of the year that any widespread attention gets paid to climate change and global warming, but not surprising. It's obviously harder to ignore when your power is going out because Springfield Nuclear can't handle the demand, or when people, cattle and crops are literally keeling over dead from heat. What's also unfortunate is that it provides a built-in snarky comeback for the flat-earth crowd: "Well, duh, it gets -hot- in summer, hippie."

Of course, the changes in climate are incremental, and we're not going to have 85 degree Januarys anytime soon, but on a global scale, even incremental changes have serious consequences, that will just keep getting incrementally worse over the years. And when you're talking about spans of 50 or 60 years, that's instantaneous on a geological scale. Maybe not fast enough for us to care about, once October rolls around and we can go outside without getting heat stroke, but I wonder how many summers of crippling heat waves that get progressively worse we'll have to sit through, before the lesson sinks in that the problem isn't going to go away if we just keep huddling inside until October.

Anyway, Hecate has been doing the admirable yeoman's job of documenting the problems we're having in supplying power in the wake of record demands almost every day, compounded by the fact that it's almost getting too hot to operate some nuclear plants. Just scroll through her front page and take your pick of the horror.

And in case that isn't enough fear for you, this article might help, about the Amazon in the process of drying up. I don't know how much stock to put it in the facts, but I'm definitely looking for some corroboration now....