Approaching meltdown

This searing, oppressive heat is having serious consequences worldwide. Consequences which will only get worse as time goes on.

I've reversed my position on important issues so many times you'd think I was some kind of politician. Global warming is one such issue. At first, I simply believed everything I read in the papers--never a good idea. Then I pendulumed over to the Dark Side, with Michael Crichton. There's a certain romanticism in rowing against the world's currents: it's intoxicating to believe that you are among a Select Group of People who Know The Truth.

Yup, uh-huh, like alien abductees. They Know The Truth, too.

I still maintain that Crichton's STATE OF FEAR makes a number of excellent points (and not all of them have to do directly with global warming, either: there's an excellent passage--whence the title of the book derives--about the sworn duty of the media to keep us afraid.)

But I now believe that Crichton's book is irrelevant. I'm starting to believe that any response we make to climate change is irrelevant at this point. I think we're either rapidly approaching critical mass, the event horizon beyond which recovery is impossible. Or we may have already passed it.

I've started coupling those troubling news reports all over the world with my own experience.

For a time, I thought the reason snowbanks were so much taller when I was a kid was because I was so much smaller. But it's gradually dawning on me that there really was a lot more snow back then. It lasted longer, too. I've seen it snow on Hallowe'en or even before; I've also seen substantial snow cover on Easter Sunday. In recent years, winter has produced one or maybe two storms of note in my area. Last winter, Waterloo Region received record precipitation and record low snowfall...meaning our climate more closely resembled that of Vancouver than Southern Ontario.
Likewise, the summer climate is changing. Within my lifetime, the summer sun has become perceptibly stronger. Most notably, the average summer night-time low temperature has increased dramatically. It used to be a rule of thumb that the night-time low was around half the daytime high: a noon temperature of 30 degrees meant an early morning temperature somewhere around 15. Recently, night-time lows above 20 have become increasingly common; I've witnessed a humidex of 36 at three in the morning.

Where does it end? The short answer is, where it bloody well wants to, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it.

Please understand, this isn't fatalism, an attitude of "well, we might as well just keep on the way we've going, we're all gonna die someday anyway". Global warming isn't our only environmental problem, not by a long shot...we've also got air, land, and water pollution, soil erosion, deforestation, desertification....should I go on?
But if the climate has changed so much in so short a time, do we honestly believe we can reverse the trend? The odds are against it. We would need to regress society to a preindustrial state overnight, and my firm conviction is that a preindustrial society of seven billion people is not viable on this planet.
Moreover, there's the human element in all this: ongoing wars to gain control of those precious last drops of oil, the better to stave off disaster another few years; coming wars over fresh water; mass migrations to more northern latitudes...are we ready for all this?

Methinks not.