I’ll be talking about something else this week, but I’ve noticed that the stalking specter of climate change has shifted from California to the east coast.
- “Hurricane Helene: Climate change is making Florida’s Big Bend more vulnerable to tropical threats”
Julia Jacobo, ABC News (September 27, 2024) - “Corral Fire in California has firefighters worried as climate change threatens to make fire season worse”
Ben Tracy, CBS News (June 3, 2024)
Meanwhile, here in central Minnesota, we’re under a Red Flag Warning. In other words, conditions are right for wildfires to get out of hand. If we let them.
Since we’re both encouraged to not set our homes ablaze, and allowed to take common-sense precautions, wildfires in these parts seldom if ever make national news. I suspect that Minnesota’s status as a non-coastal state is a factor, too.
There’s a Freeze Warning in effect, by the way, for western North Dakota — over on the other side of the Red Flag Warning area.
I haven’t noticed an expert analysis of this week’s situation, explaining how Minnesota is dry and windy: and therefore climate change is dooming us all.
Again, I suspect it’s because Minnesota isn’t all that important — or maybe it’s because experts read somewhere that the Upper Midwest goes through this every year.
We call it autumn.
Don’t get me wrong.
I think Earth’s climate has been, is now, and will continue to be, changing. I think taking that into account when deciding on whether or not to build high rises on sand bars, or subdivisions in canyons, is prudent.
I also think studying how we’re affecting those changes makes sense.
But I would be far less uncomfortable, discussing such things, if my betters would turn the hysteria down a bit in their pronouncements of perilous portents.
I’ve talked about this before:
- “Hurricane Beryl: Sort-of-Good News, and Taking the Long View”
(July 13, 2024) - “A House in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada”
(August 20, 2023) - “Climate, Neighbors, Bogeymen and Responsibility”
(November 5, 2022) - “Green Sahara, Environmental and Climate News”
(July 30, 2022) (We’re Not Doomed?!) - “Cyclone Tauktae, COVID-19 and the Siloam Lesson”
(May 22, 2021)
