would be experiencing the sorts of fever-dream temperatures this summer that once might, at worst, have been associated with northern India that Europe would, in recent years, have recorded heat and drought of a sort not seen in half a millennium that China would break heat, fire, and flood records, while Antarctica’s sea ice hit record lows. Few imagined that the oceans would heat so quickly that Texas and parts of the southern U.S. Perhaps the vast clouds of smoke from those fires that recently gave the skies of Chicago and Detroit, New York and Washington, D.C., the worst air quality on the planet blurred your vision.Īnyway, if you were to look back, say, a decade or two ago, I have no doubt you would be struck by how few commentators even faintly imagined the planet we’re living on at this very moment - and not, as predicted, 2033 or 2043 or 2053, if ever. (And, by the way, elsewhere in the northern hemisphere, Siberia is having its own possibly record fire season.) If you didn’t notice any of this, though, I have a possible explanation. That’s been true for seemingly endless weeks now with no end in sight. In case you hadn’t noticed - and how could you not? - there have been more than 500 (yes, 500-plus!) wildfires burning across the vast reaches of Canada, an unheard-of number, and more than half of them completely out of (human) control in a record-shattering fire season.
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