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You can watch the fires break out and spread only for so long before you, too, are involved.
There is, it seems, something of a disconnect between the world in which you and I live, and that inhabited by those who want to be our Great Leader for the next four years.
In our world, this will be the hottest year the earth has ever experienced. It will break the previous record, set last year. Which broke the previous record, set the year before. Arctic sea ice has shrunk to a smaller area than ever recorded, with massive, yet-to-be-calculated effect on the world’s weather and oceans. The glaciers of Greenland and Antarctica are disappearing at rates far exceeding the worst-case scientific scenarios of just a few years ago. All of this because of the air pollution from burning fossil fuels.
In their world:
Donald Trump says climate change is a “con-job” and a “hoax” that was “created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.” What we need to do, he says, is burn more coal, “an abundant, clean, affordable, reliable domestic energy resource.”
Hillary Clinton: Actually uses the words “climate change;” identifies it as a serious problem; has recruited an army of advisers on the subject, who generate dozens of position papers; but seldom mentions it on the stump, except in the most general terms.
In our world, nearly 30,000 wildfires so far this year in the American West have charred almost three million acres of land, and the peak of the season is still ahead. The ongoing Blue Cut Fire in California has crisped 50 square miles and forced the evacuation of more than 80,000 people. Last year, with 10 million acres burned over, set all-time records for the number, extent and severity of wildfires. As unprecedented drought and heat continue, this year will probably set new ones. Not only in California but western and northern Canada, Alaska and Siberia.
So what if we Google Trump, Clinton and wildfires?
Donald Trump: Trump fires campaign manager again; Trump fires back at (Clinton, Gold Star family, you name it); he apparently doesn’t know about the wildfires.
Hillary Clinton: Fires back at Trump, fires up Latino voters, fires a warning shot, but she doesn’t seem to know about the fires either.
Here on earth, floods of Biblical dimensions, expected to happen on average once every thousand years, have so far this year struck Houston, Texas, southeast West Virginia (24 dead, thousands of homes destroyed), Ellicott City, Maryland, and South Louisiana, in what is being called the worst natural disaster to strike the United States since Hurricane Sandy.
Donald Trump: flew his private jetliner into Baton Rouge Friday to make an ostentatious visit after the governor of Louisiana begged the President to delay visiting until the first responders needed to provide his security have found the missing, buried the dead and at least assessed the catastrophic damage.
Hillary Clinton: took the day off Friday. Her only reference to the Louisiana flooding has been a single tweet that says she’s monitoring it. Closely.
Drought and heat are the apparent culprits in the largest killing of mangrove thickets ever recorded in the world — 17,000 acres along 400 miles of northern Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria. This catastrophe for all sea life in the region, just reported last week, coincides with the world’s worst ever coral bleaching event, on the Great Barrier Reef, and the death of a 60-mile-long stretch of kelp forest off Australia’s western coast. There is a great dying of all forms of marine life along the west coast of North America. But in the bonfire of the inanities that is this year’s presidential campaign, these things do not come up. They are happening, it seems, on another planet.
And so much more: rising seas are beginning to inundate the streets and threaten the futures of cities from Boston to Miami Beach to New Orleans; rising temperatures are stressing the electric grid to its breaking point; strengthening storms are killing people and destroying property with dismaying, increasing frequency; climate refugees — and make no mistake that the wars the refugees are fleeing owe their existence to climate change — are destabilizing the Middle East, North Africa and Europe.
But the candidates for the office they like to call leader of the free world prefer to talk about her emails, his staff shakeups, her health, his fitness to know the nuclear codes, her secret speech transcripts, his secret tax returns.
The costume ball is in full swing inside the big house; the servants are restive but still obedient below stairs; and everyone looks ravishing. It would be extremely ill mannered to spoil the mood by mentioning the Four Horsemen rampaging outside, or the fact that the house is in the process of burning to the ground.
Do you know: How many of those fires that you mentioned were the result of arson?
Every damn one, I believe. Oh, wait, you mean the actual fires? I thought w\we were talking metaphorical…..
Tom – Bravo! Succinctly tongue-in-cheek, but seriously correct. Russ
Get rid of the smog and a lot of heat will radiate off the earth at night. The smog acts like a blanket and seals it in. A good way to see what kind of day tomorrow will be. Burn coal but keep the air clean!
Arnie
Huh? Burn coal but keep the air clean…? Uh…how?
Also, if the smog blanket disappears, the amount of solar radiation hitting the earth increases. Damned if we do and damned if we don’t.
Smog is the result of a photo-chemical reaction. No sunlight – no smog.
Thanks for the updates and your views Tom, especially about the damage being done to the biosphere (our world) everywhere. Not a mention of the Gulf of Carpentaria or the Kelp in Australia by the MSM where I live. No mangroves in the Gulf means no fishing stocks and no prawn industry there either. I think that the issue of temperature rises is now obscuring some really critical issues, namely atmospheric chemistry and physics is sufficiently well understood to know doing this will do that, the evidence shows that, what we have really not thought about is actually how fragile living organisms who have quite narrow ecological niches are. This mounting evidence seems to indicate that a warm globe is the least of our worries we are going to crash the web of life first, so after that temperatures will be irrelevant. As you say ‘Brace for Impact’. This is getting very dangerous indeed!
Not a climatologist, but being Canadian I’ve seen my fair share of ice and snow and melt in the Spring. When the IPCC released their projections for the rate of Greenland ice melt my first thought was, “You’ve never watched ice melt”. It is not linear as projected by IPCC. It is an S-curve.
Where we are on the lower part of the S-curve is the question. To quote our recently retired Tragically Hip, “When it falls apart, it really falls apart”.
To put a focus on micro climate changes – potentially, one year does not a trend make. I am in the Southern Interior of BC at the northern extent of the Sonora Desert. (Yes folks, the desert does actually extend past the 49th parallel). We have had a relatively wet summer which leaves us pondering if this is the shape of things to come? Ironic this traditionally summer dry and hot region would become wetter and greener.
Spectacular essay, Mr. Lewis. Soon we’ll be talking about the creeping food shortages, the coming economic ‘reset’ and watch in horror as ever more people, eventually including ourselves, become homeless due to climate-change related effects (including flooding, fires, toxic air conditions, tornadoes, volcanic activity, sea level rise and so much more).
And they are the ‘lucky’ ones – who are still alive – at least for now. So many people are dropping dead due to the wafting of hydrogen sulfide laced air, countless fires are happening due to methane explosions – long vacant buildings, vehicles, scrap metal, wooden pallets, straw, hay, and mulch piles. Underground electrical cabinets and substations are exploding and launching 100 lb manhole covers into the air and blackening the local air with toxic smoke.
Bridges and buildings are crumbling and collapsing along with the underground sewage, storm water, and potable water lines, while sea level rise creeps steadily up along the coasts and serious sinkhole and other land subsidence events occur randomly everywhere.
Whoever is unlucky enough to win the White House Will be at the helm when the ship of state runs aground or sinks into economic oblivion. We’re all about to live through the worst possible times we’ve ever seen and civilization is decidedly not ready to adapt to the new normal (that will continue to degrade and disintegrate).
Thanks for keeping it real Mr. Lewis.