There is one line of data that simply stuns the mind and almost deflates the spirit.
Six of the largest 10 wildfires in Californian history have happened since 2020. And the 2021 forest fire season is not yet over.
It was surreal when reports from Greenville, a Gold Rush-era town. was completely gone, devastated, and leveled with nothing more standing than a news reporter conveying to the world the horror all about.
We know some of the side effects of wildfires from the Western states or ones raging in Canada. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources has issued several air quality advisories over the past weeks for wide swaths of the state due to fine particle pollution at levels found to be unhealthy for residents.
This morning I awoke to the stark images from the Greek island of Evia, where more than 2,000 people were forced to evacuate as raging wildfires continued to spread, wiping out homes, reducing once-picturesque landscapes to ashes, and destroying entire villages.
Photos showed devastated residents standing under amber skies amid searing heat as they waited to be rescued from the island, which is Greece’s largest by area and population after Crete.
The news regarding the heatwave in the past 10 days in Greenland is also alarming. It has led to the region’s biggest melting event so far in the 2021 season, with researchers calculating that enough ice seeped into the ocean to cover all of Florida with two inches of water.
“It’s becoming more and more common to see these large melt events,” Lauren Andrews, a glaciologist with NASA’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office. That’s because we generally have a warmer climate.”

It was reported today humans have already heated the planet by roughly 1.1 degrees Celsius, or 2 degrees Fahrenheit, since the 19th century, largely by burning coal, oil, and gas for energy. But that’s only the beginning, according to a report issued this morning by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of scientists convened by the United Nations. Even if nations started sharply cutting emissions today, total global warming is likely to rise around 1.5 degrees Celsius within the next two decades, a hotter future that is now essentially locked in.
The news reports of tragedy and the data compiled in scientific reports seem unable to move the dial when it comes to how the average person reacts. The folks from my parent’s generation might term this careless attitude as whistling past the graveyard.
In this nation that can be explained in large part by one major political party ignoring reality for partisan reasons. There is no running from the facts, however. We can not plead ignorance from data that shows we have over the many decades made more changes to the climate than during the entire prior history of humanity.
We proved to have the ability and ingenuity to industrialize and so we must now ask if we globally have the brains–and the will–to meet the challenge to curb and bend the destruction of the planet from its warming.
Meanwhile, the news of climate change will showcase gripping and powerfully sad images and accounts of our collective failure.