Opinion: Climate emergency is very real

In case you haven’t noticed, we’re in a climate emergency. If you haven’t been impacted by extreme weather conditions yet, you will be.

Stick your head into the sand if you want, but the evidence is overwhelming:

• The West is burning like never before, choking on the smoke of wildfires raging from the states along the Pacific to as far east as Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas. Here in New Mexico, we’re battling blazes in the Gilas, in Lincoln National Forest and a little north of Santa Fe, all of which seems tame compared to California and Oregon, where an unusually brutal combination of heat, drought and wind are stoking fires to levels never seen before. Entire communities are being burned to the ground while the death toll rises.

• It’s always hot in Death Valley, but a couple weeks ago the mercury hit 130 degrees, one of the hottest temperatures ever recorded anywhere. The average high temperature last month in Phoenix was 110.7 degrees - en route to the hottest summer ever recorded there. And while it hasn’t been that bad everywhere in New Mexico, I’m confident this summer will go down as one of the hottest summers recorded here as well.

• Also in August, we saw an unprecedented two hurricanes - Marco and Laura - approaching our shores from the Gulf of Mexico. Fortunately, only Laura hit as a Category 4 storm (Marco downsized to a tropical storm), hitting St. Charles, Louisiana, with 150-mph winds and several feet of storm surge. It’s reasonable to expect multiple hurricanes hitting the Gulf Coast in the future - at the same time - as warmer temperatures, in the air and in the sea, continue to provide the recipe for more and bigger hurricanes to come.

• Then there was the “derecho” that raked across about 750 miles of the American Midwest. Hurricane-level winds topped 100 mph in an Aug. 10 windstorm that felled trees, toppled vehicles and ruined millions of acres of crops across the nation’s bread-basket states. The damage to property and crops was estimated at nearly $4 billion in Iowa alone.

Meanwhile, an exploding human population continues to pump carbon into the air at staggering levels, warming up the atmosphere and changing our weather patterns. As long as we continue down this path, we can expect even worse weather events. God isn’t bringing about an end of the world, but mankind might be.

Aren’t you glad we have a president who doesn’t want to send us into a panic by telling us the truth about all this? Isn’t it reassuring to know that, while all this really is happening, Donald Trump is making it go away by simply denying its very existence? Now that’s leadership.

There’s still time to mitigate the “natural” disasters we are now facing, but it will take a global effort led by the world’s largest economy. And that requires a U.S. president who recognizes the importance of this moment and reacts accordingly.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

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