Massive Oklahoma tornado
Credit: CNN
In the midst of a stifling Washington, D.C. summer two years ago, former President Obama appeared in the White House to paint a grim picture of the challenge global warming posed to the country.
The August 2015 press conference, at which Obama announced the Clean Power Plan, was supposed to be held on the White House’s South Lawn, but it was moved indoors at the last moment, after officials decided it was too hot to do the event outside. Obama might have been tempted to reference D.C.’s heat wave in his remarks that day on global warming, but the President chose his words judiciously — careful not to overstep the scientific understanding of climate change and extreme weather. “While we can’t say any single weather event is entirely caused by climate change, we’ve seen stronger storms, deeper droughts, longer wildfire seasons,” he
An important distinction is that climate change cannot be directly linked to any one specific weather event, e.g. it’s not possible to say definitively that increased greenhouse gas emissions caused Katrina. What we can say is that climate change conditions lead to more volatile weather patterns, so storms can be more destructive, temperatures can be hotter or colder, droughts or floods can last longer, etc. Humanity can deal with drought and hurricanes and other events, but our food and water systems may not. Then come related questions about our energy and transportation systems. What sorts of lives will we lead when our homes are effectively in Antarctica for six months of winter and Death Valley for six months of summer, enduring 40 MPH winds all year? Humanity has spent an entire century creating the conditions that led to this question, and we have about twenty years to get off our collective butts and do something. If we don’t, we will have created conditions that do not support human life. Our own actions – and inaction – will have led to our own extinction.
There’s no need to “save the Earth” or to “save the environment;” they will still be here. But practically all the plants and animals we know, us included, will be gone. Then, after some time, new life will start over again.
All I know is that my garden is telling me that something is wrong, especially this year with fall like weather in August making plants wither when they should be producing profusely. I don’t know how we will survive without our regular yearly harvest which we depend on to survive. I just hope and pray that things go back to normal soon or we won’t.
It is interesting that so called fact based climate science conveniently does not factor in solar radiation management programs being perpetrated by many nations which are causing heat to be trapped in the atmosphere. Climate science is a nightmare of political agenda driven fraudulent data & deceitful science where it is a challenge to figure out anything resembling the truth. Yes we are screwing up the environment big time but I don’t trust anything Time magazine reports, hardly anything of the lamestream media and certainly very skeptical of the so called “consensus science” which is an oxymoron.