The Weather is Not ‘Normal’. Why Are We Acting As Though It Is?
The biggest story of our lifetime is going on and no one cares
I started writing about the climate in 2000, but I have been following this unfolding story since the seventies when I studied something called scenario planning (more on that in a bit). I had a blog called Burner Trouble, which no one read. The idea was to document the changes, large and small, negative and positive, that global warming was creating in our society.
That was twenty-four years ago and my assumption was that this story would become the number one event in our lives, eclipsing everything else. Another assumption was that this was not coming, it was here and accelerating rapidly into the new normal.
I was wrong about the former and right about the latter. Serious climate change is here, many years before predictions, but we are effectively pretending it is not and this is all normal.
This week Hurricane Helene hit the entire southeast region of the US. This thing was a monster Cat Four storm with a 15 foot storm surge, torrential rains, 130 mph winds, and it was 500 miles wide. Even today, when it reached far into the mainland it was still a tropical storm. But it has expanded to 1300 miles wide and is currently affecting one third of the…
