Global warming: The ultimate reality show

As Mark Twain noted, truth is stranger than fiction. Even James Patterson’s talent, as shown in the show “Zoo,” might be stretched.

A show on climate change could include episodes on starving polar bears and wildfires engulfing California freeways to turn cars. A day later, also in California and not far away, heavy rains washed away a freeway bridge. Hobby drone users had their own videos. What a binge!

Motorists had to run for their lives while remembering warnings not to be outside their cars when tankers dumped water and/or retardant.

While some areas, including India, were reporting extraordinary hot weather, others reported cooler temperatures with precipitation twice the average, such as Colorado. Tornadoes and floods get much TV news coverage but do not clear things up at all.

Such contradictions allow cynics to argue there is no problem, though scientists who alerted the world to the problem never said conditions would be the same everywhere. The phrase "climate change" is now the politically correct way to talk about the fact that the entire planet's average temperature is rising.

The “Merchants of Doubt” were able to delay recognition that cigarettes cause cancer for nearly 70 years.

Are there now Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse? That would include the addition of global warming, or call it climate change.

The drought in California is the worst in 1200 years.

Some research said polar bears were starving to death because a sort of walking hibernation, like sleepwalking, was not enough.

Other research showed bears eating dolphins trapped by ice or rushing to land to eat caribou, a survival method not likely to be well-received.

In “Zoo,” animals revolt and begin attacking humans.

Research and Patterson’s story could fit in with James Lovelock’s “gaia” theory, which holds that earth is self-regulating and will do whatever it takes to preserve itself.

If true, it could wreak havoc with industrialized economies, which have been built around existing known weather patterns.
Those who should alert the nation do not appear to be taking the threat seriously. Climate change is barely mentioned, at the very end of an article in the New York Times, on how California's wildfire season is now 12 months long.
If the media had accepted the threat viewers would simply go to Google News daily, or several times a day, and do a search for "climate change." Alas, editor-driven reporters and writers are told to stick to the basic story. Just the facts, mam.