Year 3, Month 7, Day 18: If You’ll Say “You Told Me So,” I Won’t Say “I Told You So”

The Merriville (IN) Post-Times runs an AP story on the current heatwave:

Horrendous wildfires. Oppressive heat waves. Devastating droughts. Flooding from giant deluges. And a powerful freak wind storm called a derecho.

These are the kinds of extremes experts have predicted will come with climate change, although it’s far too early to say that is the cause. Nor will they say global warming is the reason 3,215 daily high temperature records were set in the month of June.

Scientifically linking individual weather events to climate change takes intensive study, complicated mathematics, computer models and time. Sometimes it isn’t caused by global warming. Weather is always variable; freak things happen.

And this weather has been local. Europe, Asia and Africa aren’t having similar disasters now, although they’ve had their own extreme events in recent years.

But since at least 1988, climate scientists have warned that climate change would bring, in general, increased heat waves, more droughts, more sudden downpours, more widespread wildfires and worsening storms. In the United States, those extremes are happening here and now.

More pounding on the denialists. Sent July 7:

Even as the American Midwest sizzled under a heatwave of staggering proportions, climate-change denialists kept on sounding their message of complacency and inaction. Everything’s fine, they say. The planet’s actually getting cooler. If Earth’s atmosphere is heating up, it’s just sunspots, or “natural cycles.” Anyway, humans aren’t to blame. The climate has always changed. If humans are involved, it’s too expensive to do anything about it. Al Gore has a big house. And on and on.

When politicians and media figures mock “climate alarmists,” it is part of their pathetic attempt to rationalize an unsustainable status quo — one which now promises massive crop failures, droughts and wildfires throughout America.

We owe our nation’s existence to those who woke to the call of a midnight rider bringing the news that the British were coming. Climate scientists are the Paul Reveres of the present day. Will we finally heed their warnings?

Warren Senders

Published.