Breaking Climate

An oft-used analogy for the effect of man-made climate change is that the weather is on steroids. Baseball players have always been able to hit home runs, but with performance-enhancing drugs they hit more than they could without. Similarly, climate change is making the weather do things more often, more severely, than it could without. This is not natural.

But that old analogy won’t cut it much longer. Because the climate will keep changing, taking weather not just into “enhanced” territory but to a state like nothing we’ve seen before. It won’t just be dangerous, it will be violent. Weather won’t be on steroids any more. It’ll be on meth.

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SO hot

Cliff Mass, in his blog post about recent temperatures, asks the question “Why is the Northwest so warm?” He then proceeds to answer the question “Why is the Northwest warm?” What he doesn’t address is the question he himself asked: why SO warm? Perhaps we should say “so hot.”