Don't Worry

Yep, nothing to worry about. Just keep listening to Fox "news" and turn the sound to eleven.

WASHINGTON — It’s been so warm in the United States this year, especially in March, that national records weren’t just broken, they were deep-fried.

Temperatures in the lower 48 states were 8.6 degrees above normal for March and 6 degrees higher than average for the first three months of the year, according to calculations by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That far exceeds the old records.

The magnitude of how unusual the year has been in the U.S. has alarmed some meteorologists who have warned about global warming. One climate scientist said it’s the weather equivalent of a baseball player on steroids, with old records obliterated.

“Everybody has this uneasy feeling. This is weird. This is not good,” said Jerry Meehl, a climate scientist who specializes in extreme weather at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

(Here's a map of the 15,000 high temperature records set in the US last month.)

If there are humans around in a century or so, or when the alien overlords finally arrive and dig around in the rubble, surely there'll be amazement that on the planet there was one country among all others where climate change denial was dominant, and remained so, the hotter it got. Where it was possible to predict a person's denialism by his or her membership in a single political party; where that party not only rejected the truth in this matter, but, in astounding numbers, rejected science altogether. And they'll stagger away (feet protected from the burbling asphalt), stunned, realizing that this was occurring not in the Dark Ages, nor when the Catholic Church was killing people for saying the earth revolved around the sun; but in a so-called enlightened period, when the discoveries of science were causing a technological revolution, reaching into outer space, wiping out diseases that had killed millions of people for generations.

And yet, here we are, the United States of America, the formerly great, the cradle of discovery and invention, where its universities were once envied around the world, where education was sought after -- and is now derided. Where experts were turned to for their ideas -- and now the whole idea of expertise is laughed at unapologetically, as political strategy, by a party that's hitched its future to ignorance, because its ideas would never be accepted without it. An entire political party whose foundation is disbelief in science. It's simply incomprehensible. Now. In the twenty-first century.

If I didn't have a kid with a fabulous fiancé and the prospect of grandkids, I'd say efforts to save this place were a waste of time.