The climate emergency isn’t going away until we implement root and branch reform
The apocalyptic images of orange skies and flames tearing through California and Oregon are opening the eyes of a growing number of Americans to the reality of our global climate emergency: a threat that is as real as the fires they see each day on the news, and that will only worsen with each year we do nothing to help our planet cool down.
It’s hard to believe that there are still people out there insisting that these fires are natural phenomena repeated every year and that “the cold will come”, despite the evidence that in the last few weeks more forest has already burned than during the whole of last year, and that each year will see more destruction. The increase in temperatures, which in Death Valley of Death recently exceeded 54.4 º C for the first time since records began, is drying America’s forests and turning them into tinder, ready to burn at the slightest spark.
California and Oregon are only a very small part of the global catastrophe, and simply more visible because they are taking place in a part of the world where there is media coverage. Meanwhile, deforestation in the Amazon continues unabated. In Greenland and the Bering Strait, ice loss is fast reaching the point of no return. Summer temperatures in the Arctic now exceed 38ºC. Torrential rains, hurricanes and…
