A COMMON CAUSE (January 14, 2011)

Humans never cease to amaze me. Flooding. High temperatures. Forest fires. Snowstorms. High winds. Droughts. Low temperatures. Heavy rains. All these things are reported in the media under their own headings. One at a time. There is no hint that such events could have a common cause. Flooding is simply flooding, and heavy rains are nothing but heavy rains. The last time something like this happened was eighteen years ago, it is reported. Or thirty-six years ago. And then the media occasionally report a word or two about climate change. As well as about all sorts of disagreements between scientists concerning the alleged phenomenon. Boring stuff, of course. God only knows whether there is any such thing as climate change. Let us return to snowstorms and droughts, instead. The real stuff. And so on, and so forth. All the media would have to do is to regularly report increasingly high frequencies of all such events for climate change to come to the fore. Going a century or two back would be sufficient to drive the point home. Forget it, though. Humans cannot handle too much information, anyway. But watch for that snowstorm! Watch for high winds!