The Fires This Time

No better way to start out with a photo like the above, and then to follow it up with a fine opening line:

Nature makes a mockery of our vanity.

Timothy Egan has a very strong piece in the New York Times, we hope will add some pile-on to more and more commentary about climate change that might change at last some denying minds.

In Colorado Springs, where even municipal officials have taken the mindless Grover Norquist pledge to never raise taxes, it cost at least $12 million in tax money — most of it from the rest of us — to contain the fire. Not everybody thinks like Norquist. …

Summer is barely two weeks old and two-thirds of the country is in the grip of a severe drought. More crops will die. More forests will burn. More power brokers will become familiar with the consequences of a derecho. It sounds biblical, but smart scientists have been predicting this very cycle.

In March, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned in a special report of “unprecedented extreme weather and climate events” to come. The events are here, though the skeptics now running the Republican Party deny the obvious, in large part because they are paid to deny the obvious.