The Climate Does Not Care That We Are in Denial

The more we stick to business as usual — and our fingers in our ears — the more the climate finds ways to show us how our emissions have altered and intensified its patterns for the worse. There's the obvious stuff that we'd all probably expect from a hotter planet without having read a single climate research paper like melting poles, ice sheets, and glaciers, wildfires, droughts, floods, etc., and maybe the more creative among us could even have imagined swell double whammy-style combinations of some of the above. But other outcomes that don't necessarily come to mind right away when you think of climate change nonetheless can impact our lives tremendously. A contributor over at Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy blog, tokodave, brought mines to my attention not too long ago. Yup, mines. Would they have otherwise entered your thoughts, like, uh, ever, while contemplating global warming? National infrastructure is another unlikely subject for climate change discussion it might seem. That is, until you watch this video...



The climate is going to incorporate greater amounts of trapped solar energy and go about its more extreme, powerful business whether or not we decide to repair an aging national infrastructure, and update it for a present and future of more frequent and/or severe events. It doesn't care if we prepare and protect ourselves and our critical, oft-forgotten systems, but we should care.